


Anomaly

by klubin (sidonay)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: (that's not as bad as it sounds i promise), Alien Biology, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Anxiety, Artificial Intelligence, Body Horror, Body Image, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Turned Into an Android, Gen, I'm Bad At Tagging, Identity Issues, Loss of Control, Loss of Identity, M/M, Memory Loss, Mild Language, Mind Manipulation, Minor Original Character(s), Non-Consensual Body Modification, Not Canon Compliant, Ocean, Pre-Relationship, Recovered Memories, Repressed Memories, Sea Monsters, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 07:16:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 91,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14910833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidonay/pseuds/klubin
Summary: Thirty days.That’s how long they promised Fjord he’d be down there, under thousands of pounds of pressure, maneuvering and living and working in the pitch black—not space: the ocean.It was supposed to be simple. An old friend approaching Fjord at a bar:hey, I think this might be more your speed than mine.He’d accepted because he’d had nothing else, was stagnating after spending a year on land instead of amongst the stars, taking whatever jobs he could. Just him and six other people tracking down a behemoth, solving someone else’s problem.It wassupposedto be simple but, of course, things rarely ever turned out exactly the way that he expected. Fjord soon finds himself with his life—for better or worse—irreversibly altered as he and his new friends try to put the puzzle pieces together and make it out the other end of this mission alive.





	1. PART I.

**Author's Note:**

> It was only a matter of time before this One Trick Pony rode again. 
> 
> There’s stuff re: the character’s histories and the types of spells/weapons they have that are probably old or canon divergent since I wrote this at the same time as the show is airing and constantly going back and changing things would mean this would never have gotten finished. Things will have been revealed—and characters will have grown—faster than I can write. At the end of the day, it was just simpler to make tweaks and try and remain as vague as possible, (mostly) only using what we’ve learned during the first seventeen episodes (since after Episode 17 is when I started working on this). 
> 
> The idea of this is very loosely inspired by both the novel Starfish by Peter Watts (the first in his Rifters Trilogy) and a throwaway piece of world-building that I had written in a fic for a completely unrelated fandom.
> 
> This fandom is incredibly intimidating. I am _very_ anxious about posting this but every time I started to chicken out, I heard [Shia LaBeouf yelling at me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10DQeSk1LaY).
> 
> The notes and references chapter at the end includes spoilers so I’d avoid them until you finish reading.

Thirty days.

That’s how long they promised Fjord he’d be down there, under thousands of pounds of pressure, maneuvering and _living_ and working in the pitch black—not space: the ocean.

“We want you to take point on this. In a sense,” the heavy-set man had said, adjusting thick glasses, glasses that weren’t necessary, hadn’t been—as far as Fjord had learned, when he read about human history in his spare time, of which he had remarkably little of (which also equaled the same amount of _patience_ that he had in learning any of it)—for a very, very long time. You had to go to speciality shops to find them, to find the type of people who still knew how to make them and they cost a damn near pretty penny if they were prescription instead of merely aesthetic. Fjord had wondered if this man—with his black tie and short-sleeve white shirt, his thick moustache—was an _aesthetic_ kind of guy or a pretty penny one. Maybe his parents were trying to prove something; Fjord had met a few of them in passing: humans who didn’t want their kid’s biology messed with, didn’t want _poison_ or tech or lasers in or around their child.

Other aliens who had found their way to Earth laughed and mocked those types of humans much more than their own species even did. _You could be so much better and you choose not to?_ They openly flaunted it. Fjord didn’t think it was all that fair, to come to another planet and then ridicule them for their own personal decisions ( _just following by example_ , one of Fjord’s fellow shipmates had said once when Fjord brought it up during mealtime, _I’m assimilating. Read your human history_ ). Then again, this was the same species that decided the real names of the races all their newcomers were called were _too complicated_ to pronounce (universal translators can only adapt so quickly when dealing with people you’ve never seen before and some words just didn’t have a translation, no matter how hard the machines tried to make one) and simply decided to come up with new ones, choosing from a list of fictional races created for an old role-playing game that had long since moved from table to holosuite.

( _You know what an Orc is? A Tiefling? Goblin? That’s you._ Nobody asked _them_ if that’s what they wanted. But their planets were dying or being taken over or just too _boring_ and both Earth and Mars were their only refuge. _Deal with it or move on_ , was the unspoken piece of the whole thing.)

Fjord hadn’t wanted to _run point_ on this mission when he submitted an application. He just wanted to be a part of it. That’s what he told himself: _I want to do this. I want to explore the deep Atlantic Ocean of Earth crammed in a science vessel with six other people._ The truth was that, after an upsetting incident (and that was putting it mildly) that had him unwilling to sail the stars anymore, Fjord was stagnating. Freelancing. He needed _something more_. An old colleague had found him in a bar one afternoon completely by happenstance, the two of them got to talking, and he’d said: _They sent me this yesterday but I think it might be more your speed, buddy_. Fjord’s tablet had chimed but he hadn’t looked at it until he’d gotten back to his apartment.

 **LEBEDEV-NARITA is currently looking for:** _**pilots, biologists, chemists, engineers, doctors, soldiers** _ **to participate in a critical mission to explore the abyssopelagic zone (The Abyss). Please contact—**

It had been very basic, the entire notice. Vague. But the ocean… Fjord had always been fascinated by it, somewhere in the back of his brain, buried and wriggling like a worm in dirt. The pitch black parts of the water were like a mirror image to space. It was as if the unknown parts of the ocean stared up at the void and said: _I’m just like you._ Separated at birth, 300,070 feet apart. _We’re twins_.

He almost deleted it because that would have been easier but he’d changed his mind, dragged it back out from his digital trash can.

It wasn’t until he was nearly finished with the application that it struck him how _bizarre_ it was for an exploration mission sponsored by Lebedev-Narita—a large-name, large-funded oceanography institute—to be asking for soldiers. He’d sent it off anyway, not expecting much of a response but then less than two days later he was dropping off a package for the fledgling tech company ExoBio when he’d gotten the call. _We’d like to meet with you as soon as possible, Mister Fjord_.

He thought it would be a basic interview. One guy, a small office, a couple hours and Fjord leaving with the promise that he would _think about it_. Instead, he was brought back to the same building but on lower and lower floors multiple times over the course of a week, spoke to about six different people in suits that got more and more expensive until, finally, he stood in an elevator that took him to the basement where he sat across from the man with glasses and short sleeves and a moustache and was told that they wanted to officially offer him a spot on the _Bathynomus_ but there was something about the mission that they hadn’t told him.

No: not _neglected_ to tell him. That they _hadn’t been allowed_.

“I know this seems… unfair. A bit backwards,” the man with the glasses had said. He had his fingers laced together on top of his desk. Just to the right, a couple inches away from being in Fjord’s blindspot, was a holograph of the man with a chubby human woman and a small child. He’d wondered, idly, if he was one of _those_ parents or if he was trying to be better. “A bit…” He cleared his throat, stopped trying to search for explanations or poorly worded non-apologies. “You’ll have to accept the job first, right here and now, before I can tell you exactly what’s going on.”

Fjord had stared him down, blinked a couple times. This office was so grey and black that he felt out-of-place in it, his green skin feeling like a beacon and that, coupled with the fact that he was the center of attention here, someone was _waiting_ for him to say something—it had given him a slight tickle in the back of his throat that he couldn’t cough away. It _was_ unfair. The guy was implying that if he _did_ say yes but didn’t like what was going on and wanted out.... Well. Fjord had heard about deals like this but only as rumors because the people who said _no thanks_ and tried to walk out of the room never even made it to the door.

Then again, what was it that one his first captains told him? _Sometimes you gotta get a little stupid._ _Calculated risks_ , he’d said, _are good for the soul._ Fjord had carried that with him since he’d heard it. Sometimes it brought him trouble—big, _nasty_ trouble—but, on occasion, it’d come wandering into the room, dragging a box of good fortune that he’d be a fool not to accept.

“Alright,” Fjord had said, “I’ll do it.” He’d been shown the specs of the _Bathynomus_ during the second-to-last meeting. They’d wanted to make sure he could actually pilot this thing and hadn’t simply inflated his skill on his résumé.

( _It’s a prototype,_ the—what the humans had taken to calling ‘Dragonborn’—said to him, turning the slim pad towards him with scaly fingers, _but it was modeled heavily on the_ _Silragitar-class survey ship. You’ve flown one of those, correct?_ Fjord hadn’t included that specific detail in his application, which meant they’d talked to his references (or they’d done their research). He had. It had been the last ship-type of it’s kind that he’d flown until he’d come back to solid land and spent most of his time in shuttles.)

“Great,” the man had said, using a word that normally came with a tone of enthusiasm but had been said with hardly any real inflection at all. He’d had Fjord read over and sign a few documents and then, once he was finished, said: _Here’s what happened_ , and started talking.

Scientists, he’d explained, had been doing a routine exploration mission a couple hundred feet above the Nepomucene Deep, right near the Abyss— _the deepest part of the ocean_ , he’d said and there, just barely noticeable in his voice, was a quiver. They’d set off a sonic pulse down into a trench, a charge that they’d set off anywhere else, just to get some readings except, this time, someone screwed up and miscalculated or, heck, leaned their elbow on the wrong button. Either way, the pulse had been much more substantial than it was supposed to be and, instead of irritating a few minor lifeforms, they’d woken up a really enormous one.

“This, Mister Fjord,” the man had said, adjusting his glasses again and then reaching into a drawer, pulling out a remote and swiveling in his seat, directing Fjord’s attention to a screen hanging on the wall behind him, “Was the last transmission from the _Johnsonii_.” He pushed a few buttons and then leaned back in his seat, put his hand to his chin.

The video was staticy, the colors dull, and the sounds kept popping and cutting out but Fjord diligently watched as a camera in the cockpit stared passively at the frantic screaming and shouting of orders from the _Johnsonii_ crew, that darted in and out of frame. At first, Fjord couldn’t see why they were so upset, despite what the man had only just told him—there were no alarms, no sparking wires, no blood. No mayhem, it seemed, other than the chaos they were causing on their own. But then: _WHAM._ The entire ship rocked, listed sideways and there, just outside one of the curved windows, barely illuminated by the ship’s external lights, was a gigantic oddly-colored mass, gliding by after having just thrown itself against its new stationary target. Someone, somewhere, screamed.

The image cut out and Fjord thought that was it when it suddenly came back and there was a woman’s face too close to the lens. She looked disheveled. Fearful. The ship heaved again and she held onto the console, closed her eyes, teeth clenched until it was over.

 _We woke something up_ , the woman said, her voice shaking as she spoke. _We don’t know what it is. It’s too— It’s too big. Our sensors caught a glimpse of it before it— Before it destroyed them. It won’t— It won’t let us leave and nothing we’ve done with what’s still working has stopped its attacks. Communications are intermittent. I hope— I hope someone up there gets this. Please don’t— Please don’t—_

Her pleading was cut short by another hit that sent the ship into a violent tumble. She fell out of her seat and the message abruptly disconnected. All that was left was a black screen, the words _signal lost_ directly in the center. The man took a moment, exhaled noisily and then turned it off, spinning back around to face Fjord.

“That— That thing in the water,” Fjord said, letting the brief seconds of what had swum past the _Johnsonii_ ’s window flicker through his head, “That was what they woke up?” It was obvious. He felt stupid for asking. Fjord knew that there were things much bigger than any of them out there. He was _painfully_ aware of that fact. And yet, actually _seeing_ something like that— It was short circuiting his brain, just a bit. His mouth felt dry. He wanted to say _this isn’t what I signed up for_ but that would be a lie. He swallowed. “What are we doing, exactly?”

“There will be seven of you,” the man said which, at the time, had seemed like a comically small number considering what they were going to be up against, “Sent down in the ship that Elva had shown you yesterday. The _Bathynomus_. You will be investigating what’s left of the _Johnsonii_. You’ll examine the point of origin of the creature and—”

“‘Point of origin’?” Fjord had interrupted. “You’re sending people down to it’s home? While it’s still there.”

“It’s not,” the man said, brought up a tablet, handed it over to Fjord. It was a lot of data, squiggly lines, old-school sonar with a little red dot moving away from the center. “Probes. Sonar,” the man confirmed. “Despite its size it’s not easy to— This’ll all be explained to you in the briefing tomorrow. Just know that it’s no longer where it started. Which brings me back to the third objective of your mission: you’re going to track it down.”

“We both just saw what it did to that ship,” Fjord said, directed a finger to the blank screen. And if they were being sent down to comb through _remains_ …

“Yes. But the _Bathynomus_ … It could withstand a _nuke_ and still be able to take you home.” Fjord had read about ‘nukes’—they were devastating bombs, created by humans and used on each other. He wished knowing that the ship he’d be behind the console of could endure such massive destruction eased his tension but it didn’t.

“And if we find it,” Fjord had asked next, “What are we supposed to do then?” The query was met with a silence that dragged on for too long.

“You’re going to kill it, Mister Fjord,” the man said eventually. “But you and two other people on board are the only ones who know that. The other four believe they’re only there to study it.”

“Why?” _Why kill it? Why lie?_ The man frowned, as if he was trying to figure out what part of this Fjord was questioning or if he was deciding which would be easier to answer.

“Because we want as much information as possible on this thing and we believe the people who could give us that would never agree to go on this mission if they knew the creature’s death was the ultimate endgame.” Fjord hated that there was a tiny part of him that saw the sense in that. He hated that this was on his shoulders. He could keep secrets. He was good at it. It didn’t mean he _liked it_.

“Who’re the others?” He’d asked after that. “You said two other people know.”

“Beauregard, your engineer,” the man said. “And Lieutenant Yasha. It’d be impossible to hide the weapons from Beauregard. And Lieutenant Yasha has… experience. The ship can handle quite a lot by itself but deploying them is at least a two-person job.” The assumption that Fjord would be alright with this part of it was not lost on him. He wasn’t a soldier. He’s seen death. He’s been around it. He knew how to handle a weapon. But it didn’t mean he was particularly warm to the idea about doing it. Pulling the trigger while the barrel was pointed at something _alive_ wasn’t a party he was thrilled to be invited to. “It killed people,” the man said, as if he could read Fjord’s mind. “Believe me, many of us here at Lebedev-Narita understand the significance of this discovery. We— My boss has her concerns about the situation. Very vocal concerns. This creature poses a serious risk to many, many people.” He lets that hang there a moment. _She isn’t someone you argue with_ , is left unsaid.

“Who else is on board?” Fjord inquired, intent on changing the subject because they could be here all afternoon debating this and Fjord had already agreed, had signed his name on the dotted line and everything. It’d be like having an argument with one of those basic robot toys for children, a short list of endlessly repeated phrases stored on it’s internal hard drive.

“As I mentioned: Beauregard. She’ll be taking care of the ship. Repairs. Maintenance. Lieutenant Yasha will— She’ll be keeping an eye on you. Security. Help you stay out of trouble.” _Pirates_ , is likely what he’d meant. They used to sail _above_ the water but had moved under it when everyone else did. They were rare these days but they were still a threat. Fjord doubted they’d find any as far down as it seemed they were going but—if this Lieutenant Yasha was being brought along—then someone somewhere must have been troubled enough to consider it a potential problem. “There’s also…” He took the tablet Fjord hadn’t realized he was still holding back, swiped a few times across the screen, read from it, chewing his bottom lip. “Jester. She’ll be acting as your medical officer. Caleb Widogast is your marine biologist. He’ll be accompanied by his assistant, Nott the Brave. Package deal, I’m afraid,” he’d grumbled. “And Mollymauk Tealeaf.”

“...And what’s this Mollymauk there for?” Fjord had asked when the man hadn’t offered a job description following his name.

“Wish I could say,” the man said, lowering the tablet with a sigh. “Apparently someone else was supposed to be on board but got switched out last minute. No questions asked.” He shrugged. “You, as you’re well aware, are our pilot. And the liaison.”

“Pardon?” That had been unexpected.

“We’ll check in with you at the end of every day. You’ll send information packets, update us on progress. Let us know how the crew is getting along. Their status. Their… well-being.” Fjord had been fine with it until that last part. He said as much and the man lifted his shoulders at him again. “We’re not exactly asking you to tell us their secrets. But it’s protocol. We ask the same of all of the exploratory vessels we send down.” Fjord didn’t know enough about Lebedev-Narita to know if that was true. “And who better than the guy sitting behind the console?”

“That’s a mighty strange thing to want from me.” Not a question. Fjord had spent a lot of time on ships and not once had he heard of the companies that ran the shipments asking for updates on the crew’s “well-being”. Everyone knew by now that space travel was difficult, even on the ones who claimed they could handle it but people adapted and managed. The only time Fjord could see it being necessary was if this was experimental, if this was the first time Lebedev-Narita was dispatching a crew down into the dark of the ocean but they were a company that was known—at least in certain circles—for their exploratory missions. Fjord had made sure to do his research before he applied. Lebedev-Narita had sent more than twenty-five manned pursuits into the water over the past ten years, some successful, some not. Despite the fact that they seemingly had been phasing out that part of the enterprise (from what Fjord read, they hadn’t sent a ship on a mission in almost two years; speculations abound but no satisfactory answers, not even from the company themselves and—based on the footage he'd just watched—obviously a complete falsehood), this was practically old hat for them.

His statement garnered him another shrug. _What else do you want me to say?_ Fjord wondered how the other six had reacted to that or if this, too, was something only he knew about. He hoped not.

“You and the others will meet for a more extensive briefing tomorrow here,” the man had said, pulled out a small card with an address flickering along the front. “And then at the end of the week, you should be ready to leave.” And that was it.

Fjord was at the door when he’d paused, turned back around and the man looked up, pushed his glasses up his nose and waited. He hadn’t thought to ask until now.

“How long do we have?”

“Thirty days,” the man answered easily.

“You really think it’ll take that long?”

“Not at all,” the man said, “But better to give you too much time than not enough.”

Fjord left after that, went right to his six-year-old, tired shuttle and sat down but didn't turn on the engine. He stared at the card still clutched in his hand.

_Sometimes you gotta get a little stupid._

Fjord laughed. He laughed loudly enough that the parking lot security guard had given him a worried look. After that, Fjord had gone home, taken his gun—his Falchion—out from under his bed, cleaned it, and then packed a bag, sat down on his mattress, and waited for tomorrow.

 

& & & &

 

That had been yesterday. As soon as Fjord had gotten home he’d found that Lebedev-Narita had sent him an information packet that wound up being solely comprised of the blueprints of the ship he was meant to he piloting. _Learn it_ , the attached message had read. So he did. He’d barely slept and, when he did, he had a nightmare and woke up with the taste of metal in his mouth. He thinks about it again, runs his tongue over the insides of his cheeks as he parks his shuttle in the almost-empty lot of the massive building the card he’d been given had lead him to.

Fjord is not the first one there. In fact, he’s the _fourth_ person to walk into what turned out to be an old shuttle hangar. He’d been directed through a door on the other side of a disused office and walked into a massive space, his footsteps echoing along the scuffed tiled floor. The ceiling arched high above him, the room both tall and wide enough to fit a freighter if it needed to; now, all it had inside was ten incredibly uncomfortable-looking chairs, a hefty desk that Fjord couldn’t imagine someone actually dragging in here, a large screen propped up on a thick-legged tripod and—looming conspicuously behind this set-up—was a black ship, all sleek lines and no sharp edges. This was the _Bathynomus_ , its name painted helpfully in grey along the left side. It had looked impressive from the specs alone when he’d been shown them earlier but it was even more beautiful in-person. There was, however, the longer he gawked at it, something almost _violent_ about it, but Fjord couldn’t put his finger on why. Maybe it was because he knew what he was supposed to do with it at the end of all of this.

The three that were already seated turn to stare at the new figure and Fjord takes a moment from this far away to stare right back.

The hazy-blue-sky-colored Tiefling in the front row—her dress just barely brushing her knees, the familiar pale blue of a medical professional’s jacket pulled over her shoulders—grins at him and waves excitedly. There’s something balanced on her lap but, from where Fjord is standing, he can’t tell what it is. He finds himself returning the wave, (albeit less fervently) and that seems to satisfy her. In contrast, in the row directly _behind_ her, is an unkempt red-headed human who had gone back to focusing on the tablet in his hands as if he’d already lost interest (it’s possible, Fjord figures, that the guy hadn’t even looked up at all or, if he did, it was so fleeting it seemed almost unlikely that he could tell someone what color Fjord’s skin was even if he had a gun pointed at his head). Beside him was what humans referred to as a Goblin, although the bandages around her face and the way she pulled her ears back into her hair showed a poor attempt at disguising it.

Fjord didn’t like to admit it, but he was surprised to see one. Goblins were amongst the first new races that humans had welcomed onto their planet but they didn’t find out until much later how vicious they truly could be. After that, a new worldwide policy was put in place that only allowed one Goblin onto the planet a year, the names picked via a lottery from a long list of requests. Fjord didn’t know why so many of them wanted to come here, considering the way they were treated. Had she been one of the lucky ones or had she been here since First Contact? He could ask, he supposed, but it really wasn’t his business.

The Goblin was giving him her best attempt at a grimace, her sharp teeth exposed, but, even from here, he could feel her nerves. Was he one of _them_? He’d never had an issue with her kind. He was fairly certain he’d never actually _met_ one before.

“Good morning!” The Tiefling says when Fjord finally makes it to the chairs and he hesitates, stares at the four empty ones—the two on either sides of the Tiefling and the other three to the right of the human—before sitting down beside the person who was actually speaking to him. Now he could see that, resting on her thighs and sitting on a napkin was a half-eaten danish, the pastry flaky, the jam shiny and bright red.

“Mornin’,” Fjord replies, moves his gaze to the two behind him. The man grunts and the Goblin shrinks back slightly but recovers, adjusts her small frame in her seat and acts as if she was merely attempting to get comfortable. The Tiefling gestures to herself.

“I’m Jester.” She points to the Human next. “That’s Caleb.” And then to the Goblin. “And that’s Nott!”

“Fjord,” Fjord says.

“Ah!” Jester says. “You’re our pilot!” She winks at him and sloppily salutes before turning to Caleb. “Caleb, look. It’s the pilot.” Caleb does not look. “Caleb. Caleb.” He lifts his head at last and, for a moment, Fjord thinks he’s making direct eye contact but something seems off about it and then Fjord realizes it’s because Caleb is staring just past Fjord’s right ear instead.

“Hm,” Caleb murmurs. “How much experience do you have?” It’s not exactly what Fjord had anticipated.

“You know, normally, when you meet someone for the first time, you usually say something along the lines of ‘nice to meet you’,” Fjord says. Caleb frowns and does not say _nice to meet you_. “Fifteen years.”

“Any accidents?” Caleb asks.

“No,” Fjord lies. There’s no way of telling if Caleb believes him or not and he goes back to reading without another word.

“Don’t mind him,” Jester says, flicking her wrist in his direction, letting out a _pfft_. “Would you like a bite?” She holds up her danish, mumbles _suit yourself_ with her mouth full when Fjord declines. She has an accent that it takes Fjord a moment to place, since—regardless of being here for nearly ten years—he still wasn’t as familiar with every single country and continent on this planet as he should be. Caleb has one also but that’s not nearly as interesting as finding a non-human with an Earth accent.

“You’ve spent time in Russia?” Fjord asks and Jester’s eyebrows shoot up, her smile returning.

“Yes! And you… Hmm. Let me guess. I’ll say… Mississippi?”

“Close,” Fjord says and Jester deflates like a balloon being pricked with a pin at being wrong. “Texas.” When Fjord had come bursting through Earth’s atmosphere, he had been stopped at what he learned later was the Atmosphere Border and then directed to the nearest border-control base on the ground which happened to be in Texas. (There were hundreds all over the planet—there had to be, considering there was no way to predict where the next ship was going to drop out of the sky. There was, supposedly, even one in Antarctica but, from what Fjord had heard, it had only been used once in all of the thirty years it had existed.) They’d kept him in housing at the base for two months, asking him questions, making sure that he was there for benevolent reasons, and then turned him loose.

He’d decided to stay while he acclimated because he wasn’t sure where else to go and, somewhere along the way, he’d picked up their particular cadence. Hearing himself speak his own language with a foreign accent still sounded strange to him but he couldn’t let it go. Jester, it seemed, was in a similar boat.

“You’re in my way,” Nott says, her voice high-pitched and slightly scratchy.

“Oh,” Fjord says, “I apologize. Here.” He stands and walks in front of Jester, sits himself down in the seat to her right. “Better?” Nott says nothing and Fjord absent-mindedly reaches for his left wrist where he had a watch wrapped around it; it hadn’t worked since the Incident a year ago but—same as his accent—he found it difficult to part with. His left wrist was where the watch was _supposed_ to be but it no longer was; he was _sure_ he had put it on this morning and he thinks back, rewinds, goes over his morning and yes, there, just before he walked out the door, he had put it on. Could it have fallen off? The clasp was finicky sometimes.

“What’s wrong?” Jester asks, noticing his concern.

“My watch…” Fjord says, trails off, looks to the floor by his feet and then straight ahead at where he had come from but the white tile floor is empty. Could he have—

“Nott,” he hears Jester say and then Nott ask innocently: “What?”

“You took his watch.”

“I did not! You have no proof.”

“Caleb…” Jester says, grabbing at his attention again. Caleb sighs and speaks without looking up.

“Nott, give Fjord back his watch.” There’s a drawn-out quiet before—grumbling the entire time—Nott reaches into a pocket and pulls out Fjord’s watch, reluctantly handing it over. Fjord puts it back on and feels a slight amount of tension ease in his chest.

“She took an earring right off my horn when I got here,” Jester says. “It was quite impressive.”

The four of them lapse into an awkward silence after that. Ten minutes later, the office door slams open and a woman with warm bronze skin—her hair pulled back and the sides shaved—comes slouching into the hangar. There’s a large pair of sunglasses perched on her nose and she’s holding a cup of what Fjord assumes is coffee. She pauses (much as Fjord had done when entering moment earlier) and then shuffles over, slumping down in the seat that Fjord had just abandoned. Legs spread apart, knee bumping to Jester’s, she takes a sip of her coffee and groans.

“Who’s big idea was it to meet this early?” She asks nobody in particular.

“It’s 10AM,” Nott says.

“Exactly,” the woman replies. She takes off her sunglasses, hooks them into the front of her shirt, gives them all a quick once-over. “You guys are something else, huh? I’m Beau.” After introductions are made, Beau gestures towards their ship with her cup. “That looks like a fuckin’ bug.”

“ _Bathynomus giganteus_ ,” Caleb says, glances up when he realizes nobody responded. “A giant isopod. I believe the ship was designed to resemble the appearance of one.” At least now Fjord understands where the name had come from. Caleb’s fingers fly over his tablet and then he grunts, lifts it and turns the screen to face the others. Fjord has seen what the people on this planet called cockroaches. This was like that except on steroids, and Fjord feels himself involuntary shudder. Jester wrinkles her nose, her mouth downturned and Beau recoils, limbs flailing, puts a free hand up towards the screen and pushes it away.

“Fucking— Is that the sort of shit that’s gonna be down there?”

“I guarantee it,” Caleb says, turning the screen back to himself and studying the image as if he couldn’t understand what their collective problem could possibly be. “There are a lot more creatures down there far worse than this little guy.”

“Other than that monster,” Nott reminds them.

“Great,” Beau says. “Cool. Thanks.” Fjord is about to ask why Beau even signed up for this mission if she had such an issue with what seemed to be _everything_ when the door opens again and an Aasimar walks in. Her large frame is stiff as she marches over to the group, moving as if she was wearing tactical armor under her sleeveless black sweater and she tugs on her monochrome hair as she sits down, leaving the seat between her and Caleb empty. She mutters a greeting to them, her name, and then says nothing else. Beau stands up, goes over to Fjord and bumps his leg with the side of her foot, nods in the direction of her abandoned seat. _Switch with me_ , the gesture says. _Scram._

Fjord lifts a hand but then complies, winds up right back where he started, scooting his seat to the right in hopes of not making things too difficult for Nott. He considers asking if she just wanted to trade seats, to make things easier, but he has a feeling she wouldn’t be interested.

A few more minutes go by. A Dragonborn that Fjord recognizes as the one who he had spoken to about the ship in one of his meetings—the one the man with the glasses had referred to as ‘Elva’—comes hurrying in from a different door on the other side of the room and the six of them watch her as she walks briskly in their direction, her arms loaded with folders and over-sized tablets, a bag slung over one shoulder. She nearly trips over her own feet when she’s half-way there and Fjord readies himself to go help her but she manages to recover and uses the desk to slow her momentum. She drops everything she’s holding with a noisy clatter and then looks up at her audience.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Elva says. “It looks like someone hasn’t—” She barely has a chance to get the rest of her sentence out when, as if summoned, in walks who Fjord figures must be Mollymauk. The mauve Tiefling, baubles jingling off his horns, tattoos peeking up from under his neckline, comes striding in. His boots click on the tile, his embroidered and garish coat billowing out behind him like a cape.

“Sorry! Sorry!” Mollymauk calls out as he approaches. “I can’t say that it won’t happen again but I will if it’ll make you feel better.” He gives a cursory glance to the seating arrangements and then moves behind the back row, climbs over the last empty seat between Caleb and Yasha and settles down onto it. “Mollymauk,” he says, holds out a hand for whoever wanted to take it, which Jester beats Fjord to. “But please, call me Molly.” Elva allows them all a moment of greeting before clearing her throat and gathering their attention with various levels of success.

Much of what she explains to them is exactly what Fjord had heard and seen yesterday: the name of the ship they were going to look for ( _as much as any of us would like it to be,_ Elva emphasizes, _this is not a rescue mission_ ), stills taken from the last transmission, the best shot they could get of the beast they were hunting. Fjord takes as much of it in as possible but lets his mind wander during lulls where Elva was looking for something, pressing buttons on a device she clearly didn’t quite understand.

 _We want you to take point on this_ , the man had said to him. Was that a way of making him the Captain without actually using the word itself? Did the others know or were they all told that they were going to _take point_?

“Now that we’ve got that all covered,” Elva says, “There is one rather major change that you obviously should be made aware of. Originally you were told that you would be leaving at the end of the week but it’s been discussed since yesterday and, due to the urgency of the situation, your send-off has been pushed up to tomorrow.” She finishes, waits as if she’s expecting an uproar of protests but there’s nothing, except for a small _oh_ from Jester. The seven of them exchange glances.

_You got a problem with that?_

_No. Do you?_

_Me? Nah._

Fjord is starting to get the suspicion that, while they all must have been good at what they do, they weren’t truly the _best_ ; they were just the ones who didn’t have anything keeping them from being stuck at the bottom of the ocean for possibly a little over a month.

“Alright then. The last thing we need to cover today is _that_.” Elva points behind her at the _Bathynomus_. “Despite the change in schedule, I still want to take you aboard to let you have a look around. Familiarize yourself with the controls.” She looks pointedly at Fjord when she says it. That made sense. He would have liked at least a couple days worth of practice before he took her out, but he figures if they were _really_ concerned that he couldn’t handle it, he wouldn’t be here. There were probably a thousand other freelance ex-space workers who could be sitting where he was right now. _I’m just the one who doesn’t have anything_.

Turning towards the ship, Elva signals for them to stand up and follow, as if they’re a bunch of unruly children on a field trip. They do as they’re told with only minor complaining. Fjord finds himself in front, Jester by his side, the others trailing behind, all of them stopping at the right side of the hulking vessel. Elva knocks on the shiny metal carapace as if someone had been standing behind the door—the seams of it practically invisible to the naked eye—waiting for her cue but, when it opens, lifting up, a set of stairs unfolding to greet them, there’s nobody on the other side.

Elva explains that this isn’t the only door, talking them through it as if none of them hadn’t already been shown the layout of the ship, as if she assumed that none of them had actually looked at it. There was a hatch in the bottom, big enough to fit any of them while wearing a diving suit—suits specially designed for the deep sea, although it _wasn’t recommended_ that they use them for longer than an hour at a time ( _you’ll be able to try them on, figure them out later_ , Elva had said as they all, one-by-one, entered the ship, her tone of voice betraying how frustrated she was that they weren’t given enough time to become properly acquainted with their situation before they had to leave).

She marches on ahead, the others following close behind. The interior of the _Bathynomus_ is all pale and dark greys, off-white and black lines, everything just as curved as the outside and lights kept low. There are panels on the walls, some with handles so someone like Beau could dig around in it’s innards if she needed to and Fjord watches her knock on one of the panels as they go by as if checking for termites. He hears Jester say: “You should be careful, Yasha. We might lose you in here.” A bark of laughter that most likely was Molly comes after and Yasha mumbles out a response. It’s just loud enough for Fjord to know that she did, in fact, _say something_ but he doesn’t know what it was.

After a brisk walk down a hallway that opens wide at the end into a circular center, another hallway directly across from them, past doors—some open, some closed, none of which were their destination—Elva brings them to a stop. There’s a ladder extending from the very top of the ship to, what Fjord can only assume is the very bottom. A ship like this with only five floors made an elevator pointless. Still, he’s surprised to see it; it’s been awhile since he’s been on a ship with only a ladder to get you from Point A to Point B and wherever else in between.

“Down there,” Elva says, directs their attention to the opposite hallway, a much shorter one than the one they’d just wandered down, “Are your rooms. There’s only four, two beds per. You’ll have to share, for the most part. Uneven numbers and all.” A sigh. It almost sounds relieved. “That’s all from me. I expect you tomorrow at 6AM sharp. _Don’t_ be late.” Everyone gets the clear sense that the comment was directed at Molly.

“ _You_ were late,” Beau says to Elva, matter of fact. Elva narrows her eyes.

“I highly doubt that you would leave without me,” Molly says, “But I shall do my level best.”

“Hrm.” Elva’s nose twitches. “I’ll be outside. Come see me before you leave.” And, with that, she walks right back out the way she came. After a brief, awkward pause, the seven of them immediately head towards the cramped hall with their rooms.

Fjord puts his hand on a door to the left, the one closest to the ladder, figures that it made sense for him to be there—if there was an emergency and he needed to book it to the cockpit, even three or four extra seconds shaved off of the time it took him to get there could save lives.

“Alright,” Fjord says, since nobody else was talking, “I’ve bunked with other people before. I’m used to it and I’m not interested in participating in any arguments.” He wasn’t going to fight anyone over the privilege of having a room all to himself. It didn’t matter much to him.

“Nott and I will be perfectly fine sharing a room,” Caleb says and it’s the first time Fjord has heard him speak since he showed them the sea creature that their ship had been modeled after.

“Molly?” Fjord asks the Tiefling, who spreads his arms, palms open.

“Why not! I haven’t had to share a room in, well. Who knows how long. Should be fun.” He says it with the tone of someone telling a joke but it’s one with a punchline that Fjord doesn’t understand. Jester leans up against one of the doors on the right, lowers and raises her eyebrows at Beau and Yasha. They stare back at her before Beau turns, faces Yasha with a fist held up. It takes Yasha a moment to get what Beau is trying to do but then, she too, lifts an ivory fist. _One, two, three_.

Fjord steals a glance out of the corner of his eye towards Jester. There’s a crease of disappointment around her eyes at their display and Fjord wants to assure her that it wasn’t likely anything against _her_. Nobody really _enjoys_ having to share a bedroom with someone else. People value their privacy, especially when they’re asleep. Especially when they’re not used to the company.

Paper covers rock. Beau turns to Jester, lifts an elbow in a shrug.

“I guess it’s you and me, Blue,” Beau says. She doesn’t smile, but it doesn’t seem it’s as if she’s _unhappy_ ; just that it’s not something she does. Jester, on the other hand, smiles enough for the both of them.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord leaves the others to their own devices after that, grips the ladder and starts climbing up until he reaches the top, keeps his head low under the contour of the ceiling and then slides open the sole door at the front, revealing a console that stretched out along the length of the front, a series of screens—currently turned off—and one large window with the shielding pulled down over it. It’s dark in here so Fjord leaves the door to the cockpit open, allowing the pale light from the hall outside to spill in.

There’s only a single chair and just barely enough room for two— _maybe_ three if it was someone like Nott and Jester—to hover behind him. He swivels a bit, makes a note of how it catches when he swings too far to the right. It was something that he could deal with himself in a few minutes but he decides that he’ll ask Beau to do it for him instead. This little space, Fjord has already figured out, is likely to be the most private area on the ship other than down with the engines. Other than the inky pitch-dark of the ocean they’d soon be floating in. The man with the glasses hadn’t specifically said that he and the two others _couldn’t_ talk about it, couldn’t talk about the secret they had been told to keep. The hidden objective at the end of their mission. ( _You’re going to kill it, Mister Fjord._ )

He’s not exactly sure _what_ he would want to say to Beau—and to Yasha, once he figured out an excuse to get her alone. Maybe he wanted to make sure that he wasn’t alone in feeling unsettled about how cavalier the order had been given. He wants, maybe, to check and see if the two other people he was counting on to help him pull the trigger on whatever this _monster_ is weren’t foaming at the mouth to get it done. He wants to know that they’ll do it ( _maybe, maybe not,_ says a voice in the back of his head and he furrows his brow, not sure where it had come from) but that they weren’t exactly keen on getting it done. It was just the job.

Fjord runs his hands along the sleek console, imagines what the display might be and then, instead, starts to feel around on the underbelly of it, searching. He should have asked before she strode away if he could do this, turn a few things on besides the lights. It’s starting to seem like it wouldn’t matter one way or the other unless the ignition was the size of a fly but then there, on the console screen furthest to the left, he sees a red dot, pulsating and just about the size of his thumb. Of course. He should have known better; fancy ships like this wouldn’t have a switch, a physical button on the dash. He’d gotten so used to flying in junkers—ships that were ten years too old to be out in space, that rumbled when they got within twenty feet of rock, that needed maintenance so constantly that their mechanic bunked in the engine room and went near deaf because of the noise—that he’d simply assumed that’s where it would be. They _did_ base the design on the _Silragitar-class_ , after all, and that’s where the ‘on’ button had always been located on one of those.

He turns towards it, reaches over and holds his thumb down until it chirps at him, shows him the words _Identification Required_. That didn’t seem practical. If the ship was dead in the water, needed a reboot, if it was an _emergency_ or he was injured, would he really have to _identify_ himself just to get the damn thing moving again? There was no keypad, no way to type in a name or a series of numbers that he most definitely had not been provided with. He doesn’t know what would happen if he let the timer run out on it. It could lock him out permanently. Lock him _in_ the cockpit until someone came to help. Fjord had even heard of a cruiser out there that had a stun gun built into the pilot’s chair and if the ship didn’t recognize the person sitting in it they’d get a few thousand volts right to the system.

But he had to try _something_.

“Uh…” Fjord clears his throat, “Fjord.” Two agonizingly long seconds pass and, right as Fjord is thinking about what he could possibly do next, that maybe the red dot required a second push, that it was one of those programs that require a thumbprint (which, really, he didn’t think would have been entirely fair considering that there were a decent number of species out there who didn’t share the same characteristic loops and whorls on their fingers that Humans had), the red dot turns green and a new message materializes on the screen: _Welcome, Pilot!_

The screens light up like a city at night, a glint and shimmer of different colors, too many of them calling for his attention, flashing out of sync with no decipherable pattern. He flips through window after window, dismissing many of them, stacking a few others to deal with tomorrow before they left. Fjord finds the command to lift the shielding over the windows and he slides the button from _closed_ to _open_. He sits back, watches as the guards slowly, slowly rise, retracting into a slim tract in the very top of the _Bathynomus_.

He looks out ahead, but all he sees is the rest of the hangar stretched out in front of him, the massive doors bolted shut from the inside. Out towards the left, though, he glances just in time to apparently make eye contact with a startled Elva, who was currently sitting at her desk. He lifts his arms, palms up towards the ceiling and mouths _sorry_ , but she doesn’t seem to react, as if she couldn’t see him. He sees her body eventually move with a heavy exhale, her head shaking as she turns back to what she had been doing. It was nice, he supposes, that she trusted that he wasn’t planning on trying to steal the ship, to make a break for it. Fjord knew that it could bash through the doors if it had to and he also knew it had about seven legs curled up, stored in it’s underbelly that could be used to make the damn thing _run_ if it was necessary. What was it that Caleb had called it? _A giant isopod_.

“And here I thought we were leaving tomorrow,” a voice says behind Fjord and he jumps at the sudden noise, swivels the wrong way and has to fight with the chair to get it unstuck and in a better position. Molly watches the whole ordeal with only a slight smile on his face and subtly lifts his shoulders at Fjord.

“I didn’t want any surprises,” Fjord says. The last thing he needed was to sit down in this chair tomorrow, get the go-ahead from the people there to send them off only to stall for hours when he realizes that he has no idea how to drive it. (It wasn’t likely; if you’ve flown one, you’ve flown them all. People liked to attach all sorts of bells and whistles to their ships but, at the end of the day, what was underneath all those novelties was all the same. Even so, it didn’t stop the tiny nervous energy that was simmering low in his gut.)

“So what do you say,” Molly says, “Can you handle it?”

“I think I can manage,” Fjord replies. They share a silence and Fjord thinks about asking him why he’d come up here but, instead, he asks: “So, Molly. What is it you’re doing for this crew exactly?” Molly doesn’t seem particularly tripped up by the inquiry, waves his hand at the question as it’s a particularly bothersome fruit fly.

“Oh, you know. This and that.”

“Right.”

“I promise you, it’s nothing nefarious,” Molly assures him and, once again: silence. This time, though, it’s Molly’s turn to break it first. “Would you mind when we leave if I joined you? I think I’d like to watch the descent from up here.” Fjord knew pilots that liked to hide themselves away in the cockpit, locking the doors despite the safety guidelines telling them otherwise and had a near aneurysm if someone so much as _knocked_ when they were trying to navigate. This was _their_ domain and they didn’t need an _audience_ while they were trying to work. ( _I don’t hover over you while you’re doing surgery, do I_ , one of the pilots on a cargo ship that Fjord had worked on about three years ago had yelled at the medical officer when she’d walked in while he was taking them through the rings of Saturn. This was her last trip before she went back to Mars, the last chance to see something like this in person. It meant a lot to her but apparently that hadn’t mattered.)

Fjord had never been like that. He’d appreciated the company because, most of the time, the people who were there were the ones experiencing something they might not get to see again or liked him enough to want to spend time with him while he was working. As long as they didn’t push any buttons they weren’t supposed to and didn’t get offended when Fjord asked them to be quiet for a moment, they could stay as long as they liked (as long as he was there—he _definitely_ took issue with someone spending time in the cockpit alone. Nothing good could come from a person unable to fly hanging out in the room where one accidental hit of the wrong switch could send them crashing into Europa).

“Sure,” Fjord says. “Just, uh, don’t go inviting anyone else. I don’t think I could work with all seven of us crammed in here.”

“I’m sure you’d find a way,” Molly says but then makes an ‘x’ over his chest. “But what is it human’s say? ‘Cross my heart’.”

“Isn’t the follow up to that ‘hope to die’?” Fjord asks. He’d heard, too, something about the sticking of a needle in an eye.

“Is it?” Molly replies and then chuckles. “How morbid. I don’t, by the way. Not today at least.”

“Mhm,” Fjord hums and then turns back around to face the console and try to figure out how to stop one of the programs that had suddenly started wailing at him.

 

& & & &

 

He spends another hour in there, knows he should have used some of his time in seeing what else the _Bathynomus_ had to offer but he got lost in the controls, in completing checklists and, by the time he looks up, rubbing his dry eyes, Molly was gone and he finds himself watching out the window as Jester skips towards the door they had all walked in through at the far side of the hangar, on her way—to what he assumes is—home.

Everything shuts down just as easily—if not _easier_ —as it had been turned on and he stumbles out from the cockpit, climbs slowly down the ladder and leaps off on the floor they had all started on. The ship is eerily quiet but he’s unsure if it’s because whoever is left is too far away to hear of if it was because everybody else had already gone.

Elva is still at her desk and she peers up from reading a tablet resting on top of the pile she had brought with her. He hears her let out a huff.

“I lost track of time,” Fjord explains even though she clearly hadn’t asked for a justification as to why he’d been in there so long after all his peers had scurried off awhile ago. “On the plus side, most of the pre-flight checklists I could do on my own are done.” Elva lets out another huff except, this time, it could almost be mistaken for a laugh. “You said you wanted to see us before we left?”

“Yes. I’ll be sending you a list of recommended items to bring with you. I’m sure _you_ won’t need it considering your history, but it’s required for everyone. Do me a favor and look at it anyway, just in case. There’s also a list attached of your fellow crew member’s numbers if, for whatever reason, you need to talk to one of them before tomorrow. That’s none of my business. Might have been helpful if there was a week before you had to leave but it was too much of a hassle to remove it. Also…” Elva starts digging around in her pile and Fjord uses the lull to speak.

“Can I ask you something?” Elva hesitates, glances up, something gripped in her fingers but not picked up yet. She doesn’t say yes, but she doesn’t dissuade him either. “What do you make of all of this?”

“That’s a bit broad,” she says.

“Do you know what we’re going to be doing down there?” The question brings another pause.

“Yes,” Elva says and then: “ _Humans_.” Just that, nothing more, as if that answered his query and, in a way, it did.

“You think there’s another solution.”

“I _think_ that this is something we don’t need to be talking about right now,” Elva says, effectively shutting down the rest of the conversation, allowing Fjord to make of that what he will. “When you signed everything yesterday, they forgot to include the form for your next of kin. I’ll have you fill it out right now. Should only take a minute.” She pulls an ultra-thin tablet out with paragraphs of writing and blank spaces, holds it out towards him but Fjord doesn’t accept it.

“I’m sorry, ‘next of kin’?”

“Well…” Elva looks puzzled. “I mean, this is dangerous, what you seven are doing. Nobody’s really tried to hide that from you, have they? If you happen not to make it,”—Fjord sees the knuckles on Elva’s other hand brush the top of her desk (an old human superstition; _knock on wood_ )—”It’s ‘next of kin,” she says quickly. “I’m sure you’ve filled out one of them before, considering the other jobs you’ve taken.” Fjord tries to suss out what she meant by that, listens for the tone she uses when the words come tumbling from her but he can’t quite parse it, can’t figure if she’s just stating fact or insulting him.

While he _had_ filled out a form or two like this in his day, the truth of it was that he’d never actually listed a name, choosing instead to tick the box marked ‘ _not applicable_ ’. All his friends worked the ships with him—or were on other freighters or tankers, light-years away and not in a position to handle his affairs in a timely manner should something happen to him—and his family… His family. They were even further away and he couldn’t be sure that they were still where he had left them when he’d gone off to what he thought were bigger and better things. It’d been a long time since he’d had someone that important.

He accepts the tablet slowly, skims it and does exactly as he had done before.

 _Not applicable_.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord talks to his landlady as soon as he walks in, hoping they can make some sort of arrangement because he’s known her to be amiable and he feels he’s been a decent tenant compared to some others. It’s not the first time he’s been gone for an extended period of time but all those other times before he was moving from place to place between jobs, mostly staying in hotels. He’d rented this place last year when he was sure he wasn’t going to be disappearing anymore but now here he was, leaving.

He’s not sure how to explain it to her and he’s unsure if he has enough in his account to cover that month's rent (there were too many other people like him, freelance couriers scrabbling for contracts and the past few weeks had been light) but all he manages to say is her name before she’s talking over him, telling him that _work was work, you find it where you can get it, I got the rent that’ll be due while you’re gone, drop the key off in my mailbox when you leave and I’ll give it back to you when you come back_. She closes the door in his face, silencing the laughter from whatever program she had been watching and Fjord blinks at it for a second before turning right back around and climbing the staircase.

Lebedev-Narita must have paid it for him. Did they know he was a little low on funds at the moment (he'd been hoping the next freelance gig would be enough to cover him) or was it just part of his compensation for taking the job? He wasn’t _upset_ , per say. He just finds himself wishing that they had told him they were going to do it.

Fjord sends a message to his family anyway. He can’t be sure that they’ll even get it thanks to all the digital traffic out there and the fact that the farther away the message had to travel, the more likely it’ll be too degraded to be understood before it got there. Besides, his communication plan was one of the lower-tier ones; between every paragraph (or after every thirty seconds if it was video) was an advertisement and they were known to sabotage—on purpose or by poor design—whatever had been sent. Tell your mother you’ve been in an accident but you’re completely fine and she might only hear the first part of it, think you’re worse off than you really are.

People had found a way around them with ad blockers but you’d run into real problems if you used it too much and the company supplying your plan found out—especially if you were an alien. Fjord had used one a few scattered times but only if the message was urgent. This one might have been depending on who he asked, and the last time he’d used one was three weeks ago. There wasn’t much they could do to him when was at the bottom of the ocean if he got caught. After mulling it over though, he decided it wasn’t worth it.

At best, his parents would simply know that Fjord had attempted to contact them. Maybe a few stray words. That would have to be good enough.

He reads over the list he’d been sent, what the fine people at the company sending them on this trip recommended that he bring along with him, and it’s exactly what he expected. It made no mention of clothes outside of a few shirts, pants, and underwear, going on to note that they would “be provided with three (3) coveralls on board that they’d be required to wear while working”. Fjord doesn’t question how they knew what sizes to get since most of them appeared to have only been hired yesterday.

 _If you have a weapon_ , it says at the very bottom, _feel free to bring it but be aware that you will be required to show our staff a permit before you are allowed to bring it on board_. Fjord eyes his gun, the corner of its case sticking out from underneath his bed. He’d been surprised that the humans had let him keep it when they found it during a search of his ship when he first landed. They _had_ held onto it longer than they had held onto _him_ and it was two and a half months after he’d already been living in Texas when a courier had arrived at his door with his Falchion under one arm and the permit forms under the other. He’d only used it twice since then and neither of those times had been because he was trying to kill someone. He couldn’t see how it would be necessary but the thought of leaving it unattended in his apartment made him uneasy.

He takes it out and looks it over again, just as he had last night. There were modifications made to it that hadn’t been there when he’d bought it but it wasn’t anything that he had done himself—they’d just suddenly appeared after the event he survived on the _Catterick_. He hadn’t even noticed them—and, apparently, nobody else did either since the handful of people who had questioned him after he was brought home never mentioned it and let him take it back—until he’d put it up on his dining room table to check for damage.

They’d made it more effective, more practical, and it had sent a jolt of anxiety through his entire body. He’d considered stripping them, working until his fingers bled if he had to, but he couldn’t figure out how they had been attached and had no notion of how to remove them without completely ravaging the entire weapon. So they’d stayed. They had stayed and he told no one, not even the Weapons Permit Office, even though it was a requirement to report if any alterations were affixed to the weapon they had on file.

He had to bring the permit tomorrow if he wanted to bring his Falchion. He just hoped that looking at the document was enough and that they didn’t need to inspect the gun, too. He hoped they didn’t see it.

Putting it down by the front door, Fjord picks the tablet up again, swipes to the second page and Elva hadn’t been lying: there, in a neat little list, were the names and numbers of the other six crew members. _This_ had been unexpected. It seemed an out-of-nowhere inclusion and he couldn’t imagine what they’d think a bunch of strangers would have to say to one another that couldn’t be said during the days they would be stuck together under miles of salt water. Then again: perhaps this was, as an old man that Fjord had befriended back in Texas liked to say, fortuitous. Caleb and Nott’s information were the only ones that stood out because there _wasn’t_ any; their numbers were a series of zeroes instead, as if they had failed to provide contact information or, possibly, that they didn’t have any in the first place. Strange. Fjord had met very few people who didn’t have a phone these days. The ones who didn’t were either afraid of technology or were hiding from someone, as a handful of the folks who took the sorts of jobs Fjord did wound up being, using the distance as an excuse to run, even for a short while. He wonders idly which camp these two fell into, deciding eventually it was likely the latter, considering the way Caleb was absorbed in his tablet this morning.

He was planning on using his chair as an excuse to have a conversation with Beau—and something as of yet undetermined to get to Yasha—but now he didn’t have to fumble around with any of that. That’s assuming either of them would answer and that they’d want to talk to him at all in the first place.

 _Brrrp. Brrrp. Brrrp._ _Brr—_

“Yeah?” Beau’s rough voice comes through clearly but Fjord’s screen still shows the phone service’s logo. She’d answered voice-only and he wasn’t going to begrudge her that.

“Hey, uh, Beau? It’s Fjord. I’m—”

“Oh. Hey. Yeah. The green guy.” A pause. “It’s kinda weird that you’re calling me, dude. I’m just saying. I hope you’re not— Because _I’m_ not—”

“No. I—” Fjord clears his throat. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. In private, without the others. You and Yasha.”

“Oh,” Beau grunts, seems to get it the second she hears Yasha’s name and no one else’s. “That.” Another hesitation. In the background, Fjord can hear music playing softly from somewhere and he knows it’s not from his end. “What’s there to say?”

“I want to make sure we’re all in the same boat.” He realizes what he’s just said. “Metaphorically speaking, I mean. What your thoughts on it are.”

“Oh,” Beau repeats. “I guess that makes sense.”

“I’m gonna try to call Yasha. We can talk this over at the same time. Hang on.” They sit in silence as Fjord does exactly as he said he was going to.

_Brrrp. Brrrp. Brrrp. Brrrp. Brrrp. Brrrp. B—_

“Yes?” Yasha asks softly, nervously. She hasn’t turned on the video option either. She listens intently as Fjord spells out for her why he was contacting the both of them and, when he finishes, he hears her let out a slow breath. “Okay.” They talk.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord is up at 4AM, which makes it sound as if he had been _asleep_ before then but that wasn’t entirely truthful. Fits and starts had been the new normal for him for quite awhile now and, by the time his alarm started to shriek from across the room, Fjord had already been staring at the pockmarks in his ceiling for half an hour. He blames it on the anticipation this time instead of nightmares, his mind racing, thinking through everything he did yesterday, what he might have forgotten, sorting through his bag and its contents without actually opening it again. Just another pre-flight checklist to go over.

He thinks, too, of his conversation with Beau and Yasha. It hadn’t been as enlightening as he had hoped it to be and not nearly as long, either. Yasha had hung up first, telling them that she had a lot to do before tomorrow and that they could _continue this if they thought it was necessary on the ship_.

(When it was just the two of them, Beau had asked Fjord if he was actually planning on wearing the uniforms that they were told to.

“It _is_ protocol,” Fjord had said, had wanted to continue with _although what could they do to us if we didn’t_ but Beau hadn't given him a chance, interrupted him with laughter.

“So that’s the sort of Captain we’re gonna be dealing with, huh?” Beau asked.

“I’m not—” He had sighed, realizing that it would be pointless to argue. If _he_ had extrapolated the word ‘captain’ from ‘taking point’, then it wasn’t unlikely that the others had as well. Fjord only wished he could see her face so he could see if she was teasing him or not because her deadpan way of speaking was already proving difficult to read. But still. “It’s not like that,” he said instead.

“Eh,” Beau had replied, “As long as you don’t boss me around and don’t turn out to be a tightwad, I think we’ll be fine.” And, without saying goodbye, she had hung up.)

He showers, checks his teeth in the mirror. They were starting to get a little longer than he’d like (although, in the past year they seemed to have slowed their growth considerably and where they were _now_ was where they typically should have been a few months ago; he couldn’t explain it, figured he’d messed with them so much that they were damaged and that should have worried him but it didn’t), could feel then against his lower lip and he closes his mouth, squeezes his mouth tightly together. He wouldn’t have time to do anything about it before he left; he had to hope that he’d get a moment once they were on the _Bathynomus_.

He’d met another of his kind on one of the freighters he’d moved cargo on and noticed that his tusks were gone and the man, in turn, had noticed that Fjord’s weren’t. _It fucking sucks man_ , he’d said during a coffee break, _but you should think about getting those shortened like I did_. He’d shrugged and it had been a sad one. _Most of us do it now_ , the guy continued, getting up to add more sugar to his cup. _It’s uh… what’s the word? Aesthetic. Or so they say. Human’re more likely to take you seriously, anyway._

The truth was, Fjord had been considering it for awhile but had been waiting for some sort of last straw to allow him to make the final decision, one way or the other. Later that day—awhile after their discussion—three humans had mocked him ( _all in good fun_ , they said when Fjord hadn’t laughed with them) and ‘accidentally’ pushed him into a stack of heavy boxes. He’d made the appointment as soon as he got back on land and took care of it himself after that. He makes sure to pocket his file before he walks out to finish getting ready.

While he eats, he runs a search on the address of where they were supposed to be meeting for their departure. He stares at snapshots submitted by a GPSDrone because it must not have been an important enough area to require a live-feed—it’s an hour outside of the city and looked industrial, what appeared to be long-since abandoned warehouses and depots crammed together, their metal doors spray-painted and sealed shut. Behind the looming buildings was a swathe of pale, cracked stone which lead to a series of docks and then, there was the water. Not the most elegant send-off that they could have had but it would definitely be the most private, unless some amateur with a drone happened to buzz by and see them.

(There was a very outside chance of that happening, though; like most everything else it seemed on Earth, you needed a permit to have a drone and it was more difficult and time consuming to get one of those than it was to get one for a weapon. The list of criteria that had to be met was irrational (ranging on paranoid), the drones themselves were expensive, and it got to a point that—for most people—it simply wasn’t worth it. The only ones that flew around now were government or military owned—or illegal.)

He checks the news out of habit, but there’s nothing he hasn’t heard a thousand times before and quickly turns it off. There’s no mention of a missing deep sea vessel, of dead scientists and a hulking sea monster. Fjord wonders how much the people in charge are paying to keep this quiet because that was the only way that they could.

After that, there isn’t much else for him to do but leave.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord is halfway to the tenant garage that his shuttle is parked in when someone honks their horn and he turns to see a sleek, white cruiser slowing down to keep pace with him. He stops and so does the cruiser. A woman driving behind it noiselessly curses at it and pulls around, keeps going on her way. The pitch black window on the driver’s side goes from opaque to clear and then vanishes completely and a man with hair so blonde it might as well had been white leans out, arm leaning on the open space, the other hand resting on the dashboard.

“Fjord?” He asks, with the uncertain inflection of a man who had asked the wrong person at least once before. Fjord narrows his eyes but nods.

“I’m from L&N,” the man says. There’s construction just down the road and he has to raise his voice to compete with it. “Glad I caught you before you left. I’m supposed to take you to the docks.” Fjord feels himself frowning, more so over the thought that this guy might have been lurking outside of his apartment building, waiting for him to come outside than out of general mistrust. He wasn’t a paranoid person by nature and had no real reason to assume that this was anything other than what the man had said it was. This mission didn’t feel like the sort where someone would come sneaking in to try and stop it.

“Alright then.” It seemed a sort of obvious plan now that he thought about it but, once again, it was something that the people at Lebedev-Narita had conveniently neglected to tell him. Fjord was starting to sense a pattern and he was pretty sure he didn’t like it.

The cruiser’s trunk pops open as he walks over and he’s surprised to see that there were already three bags settled in it. He spends a moment rearranging them and then knocks against the lid. It closes. The back door on the same side as the driver swings open next and Fjord ducks his head, climbs in, and finds himself face-to-face with Caleb and Nott.

“Ah,” Fjord says, and the door slides shut, momentarily filling the interior with darkness before the lights in the roof slowly brightened, casting them all with an eerie orange glow. “Mornin’.”

“It is, isn’t it,” Caleb says absent-mindedly. Fjord isn’t even aware of the cruiser moving until he glances out the window and watches as the buildings hurtle by, the shapes and figures of those also awake at this hour (going to work or, maybe, just coming home) only appearing as vague, colorful blurs. After a long stretch of silence, Caleb says: “So you’re the one in charge then?”

“How come they chose you?” Nott chimes in before Fjord can respond, sitting forward slightly. “What makes you more qualified than anyone else?”

“It’s not like that,” Fjord says, repeats what he’d told Beau the day before. “And I don’t know.”

“What’d’you mean ‘it’s not like that’?” Nott asks.

“What did they tell you, exactly?” Fjord counters with a question of his own and he watches Caleb and Nott share a look.

“That you were ‘taking point’,” Caleb says. “That we should tell you of our progress. If we have any issues. That any major decisions should be discussed with you. What you say goes.” Fjord furrows his brow, sits back more and turns his focus, once again, out the window. “Is that not what they told you?”

“Not quite,” Fjord admits. _A pattern_. Now, at least, he knows for certain why Jester had saluted him, and why these other three had presumed his Captainship. They had certainly given him the duties of one while smoothly dancing around the word itself. He doesn’t know if they’re expecting him to sit them all down once they were on board and hold a meeting. _Multiple_ meetings. He’s worked on enough ships to know the basics of being a good Captain to a crew (and, alternatively, a bad one) but he’s not sure it’s a position he ever thought about having himself. He had it now though—whether he wanted it or not. He could only hope that the others were agreeable.

 

& & & &

 

They’re driven directly in through the massive doors of a warehouse that was nearly as cavernous as the hangar had been. On the other side of the room, by the shut steel door, was the same desk that Fjord had seen Elva at yesterday. She’s there today as well, accompanied by the man with the glasses and what the humans called a Halfling that was dressed in a pantsuit, her hair cut short, cropped close to her head.

What catches Fjord’s attention next is in the center of the room: seven small but high-walled cubicles, a pair of coveralls in various sizes hanging from a hook on the outside of each. They wanted them to get changed _before_ they got on the ship but Fjord couldn’t imagine why; there was no press here, no photo ops to be taken of the crew before their mission. This was a private event. The only people who would see them were the three Lebedev-Narita representatives and each other.

He, Caleb and Nott go unacknowledged, as if they didn’t matter until they were all present and, with no chairs provided, they stand uncomfortably by the cubicles, their bags resting at their feet.

A few minutes later, another cruiser pulls in and Jester comes bounding out from the passenger seat instead of the back. The driver opens the door, exits and pops the trunk—something Fjord’s chauffeur hadn’t done for them—and takes out a bright pink satchel, handing it over to Jester who grins and slides the straps over her shoulders. As she’s walking towards the others, the trunk slams shut and the driver glares suddenly at the back window, makes a noise of dissatisfaction and pulls her sleeve up over her palm, uses it to wipe down the glass before going to idle with her co-worker.

“Ehh-yo-ay, gooood morning!” Jester calls out, closing the final bit of distance with a small hop and Fjord can’t help but let a small smile tug at the side of his mouth.

“Mornin’, Jester,” Fjord says, but her attention has already turned towards Caleb.

“What’re you reading?” She asks, attempts to lean closer and Fjord hadn’t even noticed that Caleb had pulled out something to read while they were waiting and it almost seems as if it had materialized out of thin air. Caleb turns his shoulder towards her, blocking her view, hunching his back, but she ducks around his other side, pushes herself up on her toes. “Are there pictures?”

“No,” Caleb replies curtly.

“I’ve never seen him read anything that had pictures,” Nott says.

“Well,” Jester says, crouching down slightly and trying to peer around his upper arm, “That sounds like a bummer. Hmm. ‘Some animal groups show a tendency toward gigantism in the deep sea; these include the—’. Oh! There _are_ pictures! They’re just a lot of graphs and squiggly lines.” Caleb moves away from her again, steps to Fjord’s other side, uses him as a barrier but Jester doesn’t follow. She shifts her face into a slight frown, a line forming between her brows as she thinks. “Gigantism. You think maybe something down there got too big?”

“I don’t know,” Caleb says. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” He glances at her face. “But it’s a possibility I am currently leaning towards.”

“We all saw that thing, right? The video they played for us,” Nott is saying. “That looked a lot more than something that got really, really big. Haven’t you told me about all those creatures that had been around for years and years but nobody found them and then one day some scientist tripped over a new species of frog in some nasty swamp somewhere?” She pauses to take a breath and Caleb looks down at her, the corner of his mouth twitching up.

“Yes. That’s true.”

“You humans didn’t know about any of us until we dropped in your laps, did you?” Nott asks. Any response Caleb could have to that is interrupted by a third car pulling up, Beau and Molly spilling out, and the first thing Fjord sees is Beau giving Molly the finger, and he cackles heartily in response.

“I see you two are getting along,” Fjord says when they walk over.

“He _wishes_ ,” Beau says, dropping her duffel bag on the concrete floor with a resounding thud.

“I can assure you, out of the _myriad_ of things that I have wished for in this life of mine, being your friend will not even crack the top fifty,” Molly replies, smiling the entire time he says it.

“Aw, come the fuck on,” Beau groans, makes a sweeping gesture with her arm at the cubicles when she clocks them. “I don’t want to wear that shit.”

“I hate that I’m agreeing with you on something already but…” Molly trails off, adjusts the same magnificent coat that he’d worn yesterday over his shoulders. The shirt that he’s wearing underneath is wide at the collar and Fjord can’t help but stare at the smattering of small scars that pull at his chest. Molly catches him and Fjord hears himself mutter out an apology but Molly makes no move to cover them, merely lifts one shoulder towards his ear. _It is what it is_. “Story for another time,” he says quietly, just for Fjord, and he barely hears him over the sound of a clearly beaten-up shuttle, a sharp contrast to the polished cruisers it pulls up beside.

The engine coughs, roars, and something deep inside of it starts to whine. Then, all at once, it comes to a deafening silence and the driver’s side door opens too quickly, the outside of it _slamming_ into the roof of the shuttle. The driver all but falls out, stumbles, tries to straighten himself, brushing invisible dust from his suit pants. On the other side of the vehicle, the passenger door gets stuck but a pair of hands reaches out from inside and gives it a spirited push. _Wham_. It, too, smashes open and Yasha steps calmly out, a heavy black bag slung over one shoulder and an enormous solid case clutched in her other hand. Fjord recognizes it immediately as one built for holding a weapon and whatever it was, it had to be colossal. If he thought _he_ was being irrational bringing his Falchion on board, he had no idea what Yasha thought might happen that they’d need something with that sort of firepower, unless it worked underwater and under intense amount of pressure.

“I’m sorry,” the driver calls out to his three superiors, all of whom were silently watching this display, “She refused to get into my cruiser.” Fjord hears Beau whisper _we could do that?_ to someone and they reply, but what they say is unintelligible. Yasha barely spares the driver a passing glance as she walks past him but it doesn’t seem to be out of an attempt at intimidation.

“Nice ride, Yasha,” Beau says, crosses her arms over her chest and gives off an air of someone desperately trying to look cool.

“Thanks,” is all Yasha says in response.

“Great!” A voice says from behind them and they see the Halfling step forward, walking towards them and stopping just far enough away so she didn’t have to shout to be heard. “You’re all here.” Despite her words, she sounds completely unenthused, same as the man with the moustache had when he’d said that word after Fjord accepted the job. “I’m sure not a single one of you knows who I am and, in any other circumstance, I’d be offended but considering…” Considering _what_ she doesn’t say. Fjord thinks they’re all probably better off that she didn’t. “I am Stodiana Lightouch. Lebedev-Narita is my company.” She pauses, as if she’s expecting praise or _some_ sort of acknowledgement that the seven people standing in front of her were impressed. She moves on. “I’m sure you’ve been told a million times about everything you’re doing and why you’re doing it,”—Have they? There’s a lot that’s happened since he’s been hired that they hadn’t been told or had been told to one and not another. It was fairly brazen of her to lie directly to their faces—unless she didn’t know, but Fjord found that unlikely—“So I won’t prattle on about it.

“We’d like you all to get into your uniforms and then we’ll have you approach the doors one-by-one, we’ll check and make sure things are squared away and then you’ll board and… Well. Off you’ll go.” Another interlude. The only sound is their breathing and the _scrape scrape_ of nervous shoes on the floor. “I would like you to know that we at Lebedev-Narita appreciate what you’re doing. Good luck.” She’s talking to them as if they’re the crew of the _Trailblazer_ , who had been sent into a situation that every single person involved knew they wouldn’t be coming back from. Either Stodiana was telling them what she thought they wanted to hear or she wasn’t bothering to hide how little hope she truly had for them.

Fjord has seen plenty of ships sent off on _no return missions_ before, watching with horror along with the rest of the planet as they exploded in mid-air or came crashing right back down to Earth.

 _How’s that calculated risk treating you now, tough guy,_ a voice asks in the back of Fjord’s head.

“This is stupid,” Beau says once they’re turned loose and directed towards the cubicles. Their silver-colored coveralls have their names slapped on with tape but a patch of the L&N logo had been stitched carefully on the upper sleeve of each of them and Fjord studies the three curled waves as they roll, the company name underneath, letters leaning and flowing in the same direction as the water. He can still hear Beau grumbling even though she was three stalls away from him and he sighs, starts by pulling off his jacket.

 

& & & &

 

Jester is the first one in line and she drops her pink bag down on Elva’s desk.

“There we go,” she says cheerily.

“We aren’t going to search it,” Elva says, “If that’s what you thought. Just tell me if you have any weapons or unique tech that you’re bringing on board.”

“Well,” Jester says, drags out the end of it, “I definitely don’t have any weapons. And, you know, just a few tablets.” She keeps smiling but it wavers the longer Elva stares her down, saying absolutely nothing at all. “Okay, fine. I have a Duplicity. And I also brought a copy of _Spiritual Weapon_.”

“Why would you need a Duplicity?” Elva asks. There was an advertisement that Fjord had been forced to sit through in order to hear the rest of the message that an old acquaintance he’d worked with for a two month contract had sent his way out of the blue; much like drones, Duplicities were used mainly by law enforcement and the military—Fjord hadn’t even know that they were available to the public.

“I don’t think that’s really important, do you?” The question is accompanied by a laugh, as if this conversation was something they had had many years ago and was now an inside joke between the two of them. Elva flicks her gaze to someone just behind Jester and then closes her eyes briefly as if she had a headache before addressing Jester again.

“In the interest of time, I guess it’s not. What’s this _Spiritual Weapon_?”

“Oh! That’s a game. You create a weapon that looks like whatever you want and then you run around _smashing_ enemies. I thought it would be fun, you know, when we don’t have anything else to do.”

“Alright,” Elva lets out on an exhale. “Give me your hand.” Jester does so with very little reluctance, placing her blue hand into Elva’s scaled one and Fjord, from where he stands behind Yasha, watches as Elva picks up a flat device with raised sides and places Jester’s palm down on the smooth surface. A white light starts from the tips of her fingers and then slides down to just above her wrist. Elva lifts Jester’s hand away, waits a couple seconds and then it beeps, a small light in the upper right corner turning green.

“What the hell was that?” Fjord hears Beau ask from further down the line. Stodiana is the one who answers.

“Just making sure you’re you,” she says. Fjord couldn’t imagine why anyone would attempt to sneak aboard this mission, although the technology for disguising oneself like that _did_ exist. People who needed to go undercover used it plenty, as well as the occasional journalist when it would be impossible to chase a story while looking like themselves. It was only superficial—a full body mask—and Fjord had heard rumors that some company somewhere was developing a deterrent, a machine that negated the effects. For now, there were gadgets like the one that Elva was brandishing. Fjord had bought a used one awhile ago, just for the hell of it (they were surprisingly easy to find), but rarely used it. He’d left it at home and, now seeing their nervousness about it, he was glad he did.

The large steel door they’re standing in front of doesn’t open and Jester is instead directed to a more normal-sized door off to the side and she disappears through it as Yasha _clunks_ her weapon case down on the desk.

“Any unique tech?” Elva asks.

“Just a… A, uh, Light Bearer.” Fjord had never heard of one before but Elva must have, because she simply gives Yasha a nod. She gestures uneasily to the case.

“I _will_ need you to open that,” she says and Yasha hesitantly complies. The barrel of it is almost as long as Fjord’s arm but not nearly as thick and the stock is intricate and hefty. It looks like it weighs as much as a small child, and yet Yasha had been carrying it around as if it were a bag of straw. Fjord can’t imagine lifting that thing and putting it to his shoulder to fire without being thrown back a few feet and walking away with a hefty bruise. “Permit?” Reaching into her bag, Yasha pulls out a small card and gives it to Elva, the words bright white and in small print. “That’s quite a name.”

“It’s the one it came with,” Yasha says impassively. Elva tells her that it _all looks to be in order_ , that she can close it and, once that’s done, holds out her hand, requesting Yasha’s in the same way she had with Jester. Unlike Jester, though, Yasha does not acquiesce.

“We’re just going to read it. Your prints are in the system. There’s nothing we can take that they don’t already have,” Elva says but Yasha still refuses to lift either of her arms.

“I’m not in the system anymore,” Yasha says and then: “You know it’s me.” There are a strained few seconds where nobody says anything and Fjord can see Elva’s fingers flex, her arm tightening as if she’s considering reaching across the desk and making a grab for Yasha’s wrist, which was surprising considering how quick she had been to dismiss Jester despite her refusal to divulge why she had a Duplicity device in her bag. Fjord hasn’t known Yasha for very long, but he’s already aware of how potentially bad of an idea that would be.

“I think,” Fjord says, taking a step closer towards the two, “That—as you had said earlier, Elva, in the interest of saving time—it might be less complicated to simply let this slide for now. I assure you, if I notice anything hinky once we’re on board in regards to Yasha not being who she says she is, which I find very unlikely, I will immediately let you know.” Another tense second passes when he finishes but, remarkably, Elva backs down, relaxes her limbs and then holds her arm out towards the same door that Jester had gone through. Yasha picks up her things and leaves without a thank you.

“You just saved me from doing something very stupid,” Elva says, shakes her head but it’s more at herself than anyone else. “Any unique tech?”

“No,” Fjord says, lifts his own gun case and lowers it carefully onto the desk. This wasn’t the only weapon he wound up bringing but it was the only one that came with a permit, so the other he kept buried in his bag. His Hexblade had been a gift from the Captain on the _Catterick_ , a man who said that he had _a heck of a lot of potential_ and that he shouldn’t waste it. He hadn’t known what his potential had to do with being given a knife, but he’d accepted it and kept it hidden under whichever pillow he happened to lay his head on. He’d almost forgotten about it, considered leaving it behind (it wasn't particularly useful anymore, had been—like his watch and maybe himself—damaged in the attack) but—much like the thought of not taking his Falchion—it didn’t sit right with him.

(He’d never know what potential the man had seen in him and these days, that word gave Fjord an awful feeling in his stomach. He still had yet to pinpoint why, but it started after he’d come home the last time.)

“Let’s see it.” Fjord opens the case and digs out his permit, hands it over. Elva looks back and forth between the Falchion and the permit card, back and forth too many times and Fjord feels his throat go dry. She’s seen this type of gun before. She notices the modifications. How could he explain— “Okay.” The permit is with him again, the case is closed. That was it. He holds out his hand for her without being asked to. The machine is warm against his palm, tingles slightly, and he finds himself holding his breath even though he _knows_ he’s himself. _Bing!_ The light goes green.

Just before the door closes behind him, Fjord can hear Caleb quickly answering Elva’s questions before she can even ask them (“Yes, we have ‘unique tech’. Nott and I have a pair of—” The door shuts before he finds out what they have).

Outside, Fjord is hit with the heady stench of brine and decay. The pale concrete stretch of ground, kudzu growing through thick cracks, goes forward only a few feet before coming to an abrupt stop by the edge of the water. There’s a slick coating of algae and who knew what else thanks to years of humans dumping and dumping garbage into the water floating on the surface. It looks relatively unchanged from the snapshots he’d stared at this morning except this time, nestled beside one of the docks that was still intact enough for them to walk on, the underbelly just barely skimming the water, was the _Bathynomus_.

The man with the glasses is standing off to the side, typing slowly, pecking at one letter at a time.

“Are you really not in the system anymore?” Fjord asks Yasha while they wait.

“Mhm. I… I had someone I know take me out three years ago,” Yasha says.

“Can’t you get yourself into trouble for that?” It was a requirement. That was, at least, what they told him when he made it clear that he planned on staying when he was brought into the Texas base. _Put your hand here, sign this, tell us everything, we promise we won’t use it for anything unsavory_. Nobody had said that opting out was an option.

“Not necessarily,” Yasha says. “Certain things are… more difficult.”

“Yeah. I wasn’t in the system for a long time when I was a kid and nobody cared,” Jester chimes in with just as the door opens again. Caleb and Nott walk out, Caleb’s face red with frustration, and they all hear Beau yelling:

“But _Yasha_ and _those two_ didn’t have fucking do it! I don’t get why _I_ should have to—”

The door closes.

 

& & & &

 

There is no ceremony. There are no big speeches outside of the one that Stodiana had given them earlier and the Halfling doesn’t even come out of the warehouse to send them off. The man with the glasses goes back inside, simply out there to babysit, as if they thought the crew would leave without an official say so.

It’s just the seven of them, a ship, and Elva.

“Hm. So. The Station Number for L&N has been programmed into the ship’s computer. No matter the time of day, there should always be someone there to respond. And I, um. Well.” Elva falters, looks apprehensive, but then shoves her hand in the front pocket of her suit, takes something out and approaches the group. When she unfurls her fingers, there’s a two-inch wide, silver-colored pendant resting in her palm. “Don’t tell anyone I’m giving this to you. It’s— It’s Bahamut.” She holds it out and no one moves at first but then Fjord reaches out for it. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Nott take a swig from a small flask and Caleb mutters something softly to her. “Now.” She backs away, straightens herself out. “Go on. Get going.”

The wide door on the side of the _Bathynomus_ slides quietly open without anyone asking it to and Fjord lets everyone go in ahead of him before climbing up the small steps. He knocks on the interior of the door, just as Elva had done to open it yesterday and it falls shut.

“Now it’s all up to you,” Molly says to Fjord once they’re all standing in the circular space in the center of the ship, right by the ladder.

“No pressure,” Nott says.

“Thanks,” Fjord replies and then starts to climb. Someone follows, whom he assumes is Molly who hadn’t forgotten their arrangement and, just as he guessed, he’s right behind him as Fjord walks into the cockpit. What he _doesn’t_ expect is a third person shouting: _Hey! Wait up!_ And Fjord turns before he shuts the door to see the top of Jester’s head coming up from the hole in the floor, her hands gripping the ladder tightly. She leaps onto the floor, the metal clanking under her shoes and she enters the room, looking around with wide, interested eyes. “Molly…” Fjord drags out his name, warningly. _What did I say?_

“It’s just one more,” Molly says. “And she asked so nicely.” Fjord sighs as he sits, puts the pendant that Elva had given them on the dash where he could see it.

“Fine.” Same as before: thumb on the button, says his name, and everything lights up except this time he’s actually going somewhere. There are a few more beeping windows to clean up and brush aside, a few more checklists he needs to complete that he can’t do on his own and so he opens shipwide communication, searches for Beau and it takes her a second to respond but then she’s there. They go through everything they can. Meanwhile, as they work, Molly and Jester chatter behind him. He thinks he hears something about Tarot cards and a reading and Jester gasping, oohing and ahhing.

Ten minutes later, everything is clean, the screen on the middle console has the windows that Fjord plans on using the most often laid out—easy for him to navigate in the four corners—and, in the center of the screen, taking up the most space, were the flight controls. Once they had reached the depth that they needed to be at, Fjord was confident that he could plug in their destination and let the onboard computer do the rest on its own. If they hadn’t hinted at him being the Captain, Fjord would almost wonder why they even needed him at all.

The engine thrums, whirrs, and the _Bathynomus_ lurches forward. It’s not meant for above water but Fjord wants to take it away from the dock and he pulls it forward a few feet, checks the radar, the cameras, to make sure he’s in the position that he wants to be and then stops.

“Alrighty,” Fjord says, his fingers moving quickly. “Yeehaw.” And then he dives.

It begins at a slight angle but, once it falls past the shelf, the _Bathynomus_ drops straight down, punching through the fight of the water’s resistance like it was nothing. Fjord, Molly, Jester, and Beau (who had come running—with the _whump, whump, whump_ of bare feet on the floor—mere seconds after the ship had started it’s decent, asking if she’d _missed it_ ) all watch as the ocean starts to slowly swallow the ship, creeping up over the window. The horizon and the sky disappear and, after awhile, so does the light.

Exterior lights attached to the ship take the place of sunlight, softly illuminate the space around them and become marginally brighter the deeper they go. They’ve only gone thirty feet. Little less than nineteen-thousand to go.

“This is it,” Fjord tells the other three. “It’ll be a little while until we reach the bottom. I’m gonna stay here ‘til we do.” He turns away from the console to look at them before they decide to leave. “Hey. Uh. I know there’s a mess— a place where we all eat. I was thinking we could meet in there once I’m done in here. The seven of us. Have coffee. Get to know each other a little better. And I’ve got something I want to say to everyone.”

“Cool,” Beau says when he finishes. “I’m out, though. This stopped being interesting the second we went full under. I’ll catch you again at chow time.” She leaves. Molly follows suit shortly after, citing a need to do something about _this god awful jumpsuit_ and then it was just Fjord and Jester.

“I’ll keep you company,” Jester says.

“You don’t have to. There’s nowhere for you to sit.”

“Sure there is!” Jester says and promptly plops herself down cross-legged on the floor. She takes out a small notepad from one of her pockets, a pen from the other. Opening it to a blank page in the middle, she starts to draw.

As Fjord turns back towards the consoles and the expansive window, keeping an eye on the progress, he thinks he can hear her starting to quietly—and off-key—sing.

 

& & & &

 

They hit the bottom. It’s pitch black outside of the ship, out beyond the lights and Fjord dims them as low as they’ll possibly go without shutting them down entirely. He knows nothing out there could see in through the forward-facing window and, besides, there wouldn’t be anyone up here to look out of them, so he slides the switch across the screen. The safeguards release from where they’re hidden when they’re not needed and slowly cover up the outside world, leaving it as nothing but a series of green lines and faded, delayed, colorless images from exterior cameras.

The coordinates for the _Johnsonii_ have already been put into the system by someone else and all Fjord has to do is push one more button and the ship is on it’s way. Fjord considers letting the legs out just to see how it moves, but he knows that could potentially double the time it took to get to their first stop. They have the location for it, but _getting_ there is something else entirely; there are still entire areas of the ocean that were unmapped and even Fjord knows how much things can change.

He opens up shipwide communications again.

“We’ve hit the bottom, folks. The ship can take it from here. I’d really appreciate it everyone could meet me in the dining area.” Before he can close the channel, Jester is on her feet and she leans past Fjord to shout:

“It’s coffee time!”

 

& & & &

 

Jester tells Fjord that she needs to get something from her room, that he should just go on ahead. _It’s two floors down from here_ , she informs him even though she doesn’t have to, he’s studied the layout and the place didn’t have too many rooms. Easy to memorize. They start their descent down together, Fjord letting her go first since she had further to go and, as he climbs off back onto solid ground, he hears Beau and Jester talking at each other a little ways down the hole.

(“You’re going the wrong way.”

“I have to get something from my room, _Beau_!”

“Well, get out of the way, I’m trying to go up.”

“How come I have to move? Maybe _you_ should get out of _my_ way!” And then, from another floor, Molly:

“Somebody do _something_ before I leap on and damn the consequences.” The sound of feet, of grumbling, and Fjord is left wondering who’s bright idea it was to only have one way for people to get from floor to floor.)

He’s a few feet from the door when an orange cat trots by right in front of him. He stops dead in his tracks, watches it go, and it jumps down the cavity in the middle of the ship. He knows there are people going up and down but not single one of them react with surprise.

Beau comes up and out, stops when she sees Fjord just standing there.

“Did you see a cat?” Fjord asks.

“Sure,” Beau says, like it’s no big deal. “The cat.” She walks past him and into the dining area.

The room turns out to be a medium-sized kitchen, a counter in an ‘L’ shape built into one corner of it, rows of cabinets with frosted glass, a fridge shoved against one wall. There’s a tiny oven, a stovetop with only two burners, a coffee machine on the counter which Fjord realizes with mild apprehension that he has no idea how to work. Off-center is a round table just barely big enough for all of them to sit around, a low white light hanging over it which someone must have thought would give the place some sort of ambience.

“You know how to—?”

“Not a clue. You sure that’s even a coffee thing?”

“Pretty sure,” Fjord says and the two of them set to work.

The rest of them come slowly trickling in and, by the time Yasha finally enters, the coffee is done and everyone but Fjord is seated at the table. They’ve got mugs in front of them, all of them just _here_ and that’s when it hits him that _he’s in charge_. He asked them to be here and they showed, no questions asked. They’re talking amongst themselves and he watches them for a moment.

Jester—who brought a box of doughnuts too large to have been able to fit in her bag but that pink satchel was the only thing she had with her—unable to sit still, a ribbon tied around one of her horns. Caleb and Nott, murmuring to one another, Caleb’s arms pulled tight against himself, Nott’s arms crossed, her beverage completely ignored. Beau, sitting on the table instead of her chair, one leg up, the other swinging down, bare heel hitting the furniture with a dull _thud, thud, thud_. Molly, twirling his mug in circles, laughing at something that Jester had said that Fjord realizes slightly late that his universal translator didn’t understand. Yasha, a big woman attempting to make herself seem small, simply listening, observing, but nods when Molly speaks to her. The only one of them still in their L &N coveralls is Fjord. The rest had gotten back in the clothes they’d arrived to the warehouse in.

This was his crew. Not _a_ crew. _His_ crew. He should feel awed but, instead, it makes him uneasy.

Their grouped conversations break, there’s a lull, and during it, Beau says:

“Hey, did you know that it says there are nine people on board?”

“Nine?” Nott questions, points out the obvious: “But there are only seven.”

“I know! Fuckin’ weird, man,” Beau says, shrugs, takes a hearty drink from her mug.

“Do you think that maybe there were supposed to be nine but two dropped out?” Jester asks.

“Perhaps they originally were going to have two more crew and decided they could whittle it down to seven,” Caleb suggests. Molly snorts.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true.”

“Well,” Jester says, “We _do_ have Caleb’s cat, Frumpkin. That’s eight.”

“That’s _Caleb’s_ cat?” Fjord asks.

“Ah. Right.” Caleb whistles through his teeth and, after a few seconds, the same cat that Fjord had seen walk past him comes padding into the room. It leaps up onto the table beside Beau, who gives it a few scritches on its head. It turns to Fjord next, starts to close the short distance between them but then comes to a near screeching halt, backs away and lets out a mechanical sounding hiss. Caleb reaches out to it, puts a hand on its back in an attempt to calm it down. “That’s strange,” he says. “Frumpkin usually… Well. He usually only reacts that way around—”

“It’s alright,” Fjord says, doesn’t let him finish. “Is that… real?”

“If you mean in the broad sense of the term ‘real’, then yes. But if what you are asking is if Frumpkin is made of flesh and bone then, no. He’s an AI.”

“Well,” Fjord says, “He’s very convincing.”

“I should hope so.”

“Where’d you get ‘im?”

“At a pawn shop,” Caleb says. “He was broken, and the original owners had upgraded since then. I knew Nott could fix him, so I brought him home. Of course, Nott has also broken him herself numerous times as well.”

“I get frustrated sometimes,” Nott says. “I always repair him though, don’t I?”

“That you do.”

“Tell them about the other thing,” Nott says and Caleb gives her a pained expression as if this was something they had talked about _not_ sharing but Nott had brought it up anyway. Now, there was no use backpedaling.

“‘Other thing’?” Beau asks. “What ‘other thing’?” Caleb lets out a long, slow exhale.

“I have an implant. When I activate it, it allows me to see and hear through Frumpkin’s ears and eyes.” There’s a silence after he explains it, the rest of them sharing a series of looks ranging from intrigued to troubled. Fjord had heard of people who did things like that, messed with their own biology by putting technology under their skin. There were successes, sure, but Fjord also knew of the horror stories: botched surgeries done by doctors without medical licenses. Tech companies doing experiments that go wrong only to get out of legal trouble because the people who died were ‘volunteers’ and knew what they were signing up for. A man rampaging through a mall because the neurological enhancer in his brain went funny. Organs shutting down. It was a touchy subject, one that sparked the sort of debates that either ended exactly how they began with neither side changing their mind or the two people coming to blows.

“Bullshit,” Beau says with her mouth full, having at some point picked up a second doughnut. Caleb looks perturbed at the response.

“Ooh, yes. I want to see it!” Jester says, clapping her hands together.

“It’s not really something I—”

“If you don’t do it,” Beau talks over Caleb, “Then I’ll just assume you’re lying to us.” Caleb’s cheeks go pink from irritation and he sighs again, looks for support from _anyone_ , his gaze settling on Fjord.

“You don’t have to do it if you don’t want,” Fjord assures him. This garners a scoff from Beau, which sends crumbs flying. She lifts her arms, bends them at the elbow and sticks curled fists under her armpits, starts to move her arms up and down. Fjord has no idea what she’s implying and, apparently, neither does anyone else except for Caleb.

“Fine. Yes! One of you go outside the room where we can’t see you and… do something. I will send Frumpkin out and tell you what it is.”

“I’ll go,” Molly says when no one else steps forward. He lifts himself up and marches out the doorway, stands just enough off to the side that they can’t see him, but they can hear him clearly when he speaks. “Okay!”

“Alright,” Caleb says. “When I do this… Well. I won’t be able to see or hear or feel any of you. So please don’t— Don’t.” Fjord feels compelled to remind him once again that this wasn’t necessary, that he didn’t have to go through with this just because Beau was picking at him about it but Nott speaks before he has a chance to open his mouth.

“I won’t let them do anything to you,” she says and pats Caleb on the arm.

“Alright,” he repeats. He inhales/exhales through his nose, picks up his hands from where they’d been resting on his lap and presses his palms flat against the table’s smooth surface. Staring at Frumpkin, Caleb narrows his eyes and then closes them completely. Fjord sees him clenching his jaw, pushing his back teeth together and then an eerie sort of countenance washes over him, almost like a ripple. His body doesn’t go _slack_ , but there’s something _off_ about the way he’s holding himself, how he’s sitting.

Frumpkin suddenly gets up on all four of his feet and bounds off the table, walking slowly out of the room, his tail up and curling at the tip, right and left, almost like a question mark attached to his body.

“Molly is… He is sitting cross-legged on the floor.” When Caleb speaks his tone is flat, his words stilted. It was the speech of a man who still was not used to being unable to hear himself talk. “He is using sign language at me. What… What a good… little cat you are.” Sign language had been one of the _last_ languages that the universal translator had been tasked to learn and Fjord isn’t surprised it takes a moment for all the words to be sorted out. What he _doesn’t_ quite understand is how _Caleb_ knows that; everyone’s translators were in their ears but the ears Caleb was currently hearing through were not his own. The deaf had ways of making it work but, for Caleb, this was merely temporary. There must be one in the cat. Either that, or Caleb just _knew_ it on his own.

“Well, fuck me,” they hear Molly exclaim from outside. “Well done.” He comes back inside, Frumpkin moving along with him, hopping back onto the table. Caleb takes a shuddered breath in, clenches his back teeth together again and opens his eyes.

“I hope that was satisfactory,” he says, addresses the comment towards where Beau was sitting.

“Was that true? What he said?” Beau questions Molly instead, who raises his arms up in a sort of shrug.

“Every word of it.”

“Fuckin’ wild, man,” Beau says.

“Do you use it to spy on people?” Jester asks. “You sneak up on people and know their secrets? Play little tricks? That is what _I_ would do.”

“No,” Caleb says. “But it has… proven useful in the recent year or so.” Frumpkin meanders over towards Yasha—who has been exceptionally quiet the entire time—and gives Fjord a wide berth, taking the long way around to get to her. She absent-mindedly reaches over to pet him carefully on the head. Jester starts asking more questions, which Caleb provides answers to either vaugly or with non-committal noises and Fjord would be content to let them all carry on like this but he knows he had told at least three of them that there was another reason outside of _getting to know each other_ that he had asked them all to be in the same room.

Fjord clears his throat once, twice. He says _excuse me_ , followed by a _hey_ , which grabs the attention of Yasha, who subtly nods at him and then turns to everyone else and repeats:

“Hey.” He doesn’t know if there’s a difference in how she says it or maybe because it’s coming from her but it works all the same, and the other five domino into silence.

“Before I say what I wanted to—what I originally asked you all in here for… As I mentioned, we hit the bottom,” Fjord says, “At the current speed we’re going, it should take us about two days to get to where the _Johnsonii_ is. The ship can handle most of it by itself but I will likely need to keep track of our progress and make any necessary course corrections.” He didn’t know that for sure but he’d feel nearly _useless_ otherwise. That and, while it was true that computers had made near immeasurable progress as time crawled on, they—much like people—had the capacity for making even the smallest of mistakes that could, in turn, cause very big problems. It was a well known fear of pilots that they would set in a course and then go to bed, only to wake up and find that the ship had made a few erroneous leaps in logic when met with an obstacle it didn’t understand and now they were sixty miles off course and low on fuel. Or, perhaps, it had decided that a shortcut would be more beneficial in the long run but that shortcut blasted right through an abandoned, covert minefield that it didn’t know was there.

Fjord didn’t expect to find a minefield out here but, even with cameras and sensors and lights, the _Bathynomus_ was still fumbling around in the dark on uneven terrain and an extra pair of eyes never hurt anybody.

“I know we’ve all gotten some… conflicting facts about what my position is here other than as your pilot. As far as I’m concerned, my duties are to make sure we get to our destinations in one piece and I am the voice that L&N expects to hear at the end of each day with updates. But nothing more. I am merely a… a pipeline, if you will.”

“You’re a string,” Caleb interrupts and then looks flustered, as if he hadn’t meant to say that out loud but now everyone was staring at him again, waiting for a clarification. “A very, very, very long time ago, humans found a way to speak to one another through tin cans, which were connected by a single piece of string.”

“That really worked?” Jester asks, brow furrowing. It _did_ sound absurd.

“It did,” Caleb says. “The string is what carried the sound. Without that link you’d merely be shouting at each other and hoping for the best.” Fjord grunts, thinks it over and decides he likes that, lets Caleb know as much. He’s about to continue, but the others have—once again, like a miscalculating computer—been driven slightly off-course.

“I’m not sure how much I like being referred to as a ‘tin can’,” Beau says. “Makes me feel like you’re calling me a robot.”

“I don’t know,” Jester says, “I think it would be cool to be a robot.”

“Are you kidding? No way. Robot’s are fuckin’ _creepy_.”

“ _Beau_ ,” Jester whispers admonishingly, nods her head towards Frumpkin, who had moved on to curl up in front of Molly.

“Oh, please,” Beau waves a hand at him. “He’s a cat. He doesn’t understand me.”

“Yes he does,” Nott says. “He can hear everything you’re saying.”

“You should apologize,” Jester says.

“Look,” Beau tells her, “He’s cute and all but I’m not saying sorry to a cat.” At that, Frumpkin lifts his head and stares point blank at Beau, unblinking, glossy eyes wide. “You fuckin’ did that on purpose,” Beau says to Caleb, who lifts his hands, palms out towards her. _I did nothing_.

“Guys,” Fjord says, jumping in during a minor lull, “I just need a few more minutes of your time. Please.” Again: silence. “The rest of it, the implication that I’m the ‘captain’ here, whatever else that they told you but, more specifically, that major decisions should be discussed with me first, that ‘what I say goes’... That doesn’t track with me. When the time comes that any significant decisions need to be made, they will be made as a team and as far as more minor, person by person decisions go, I will trust you all to make the right choices in regards to the safety of both this ship _and_ each other.” He stops. He’s fairly certain that was it and, if it was not, it wasn’t as if they wouldn’t be constantly running into each other in here.

“Are you sure you aren’t the Captain?” Beau asks. “Because that seemed like a very ‘captain-y’ speech to me.”

“Yes,” Jester is nodding. “It was very powerful.”

“I, for one, definitely felt a shudder up my spine,” Molly says. “I feel as if I should be applauding.” They were teasing him which Fjord took as a good sign. Either that, or everything he’d just said had gone in one ear and slid right out the other.

 

& & & &

 

There’s a part of Fjord that wished he could say that the next two days had been eventful but, the truth of it was that everything went by as smoothly as he could have hoped for; twice during their travels he had to make some adjustments to the navigation as the _Bathynomus_ began to veer off-course, turning an angle of only a few degrees that may, in other circumstances, have not mattered but, down here, could find them hopelessly lost.

He talks to L&N when the clocks on board tell him that a day had passed up on the surface and, on the first night, he’s surprised to hear Elva’s voice coming in from the other end of the line. It’s remarkably clear, considering how far away from each other they are.

(“How goes day one, _Bathynomus_?” Elva asked.

“All good,” Fjord had replied, “We’re making good time. Should be at the _Johnsonii_ day after tomorrow. Everyone’s getting along.”

That had been pretty much it.)

The crew itself mostly stays out of each other’s way but Fjord makes sure to talk to each of them at least once, to check in because even if he hadn’t been _told_ to do it, he probably would have anyway. He catches them spending moments together, usually in pairs, although it’s typically Jester he finds with someone, talking animatedly or, conversely, carrying on a low conversation. On the afternoon of the second day, Fjord had walked into the kitchen for coffee and caught her in the middle of teaching Nott how to play a card game that didn’t sound familiar, Caleb sitting across from them, a tablet out in front of him. They were playing with a small handful of real credit chips in a variety of colors but mostly copper (the smallest amount you could throw around) and, after Jester explained what the next step was, they placed their cards face down on the table.

“One, two, three!” Jester had counted. They flipped. “Aha!” It was clear by Jester’s exclamation that she had won and, if that hadn’t been the signifier, the way she stretched out her arm and pulled the tiny pile closer to herself would have been a clear indication. Nott had turned her head slowly to Caleb.

“Caleb, I lost two of your copper chips.” She didn’t sound worried as if this was something she expected Caleb to lash out at her about, but remorseful instead, like the money meant a great deal to him and she had no intention going into this to lose them.

“It’s alright,” Caleb said.

“This was a practice game, wasn’t it?” Fjord had asked from his spot by the counter. He hadn’t wanted to get involved, but it was difficult not to. The machine _dinged_ , the light going from yellow to red to green. It sputtered, rumbled, and then a steady stream of dark brown liquid began to pour into his mug. “You were teaching Nott how to play?” Jester nodded. “Well then, I don’t see how it’s fair for you to actually take her money. You clearly had an advantage.”

“Why though? I won. I won it.”

“Really,” Caleb said, “It’s alright. Nott will get it back.” He doesn’t say _how_ Nott will get the money back, though, and Fjord had flashed back to their very first meeting when she had taken his watch.

They eat meals together, although the number of people varies depending on the time of day. What _doesn’t_ vary is the fact that the meals are merely tolerated by those that eat them. It was discovered the night of the first day that not a single one of them knew how to prepare a proper meal; a very passionate tournament of rock, paper, scissors had been initiated and, at the end, Molly had won (or lost, depending on who you asked). What he’d presented them had been decided to have been the best they could hope for and, from that point on, was voted to be their honorary chef.

(“I’ll make dinner,” Molly said to everyone, “Maybe lunch. Everything else, you’ll just have to fend for yourselves.” And then, later, to Fjord while he helped to clean up: “ _You_ did this. I wouldn’t have to cook for everyone if you hadn’t turned this ship into a democracy.”)

There was a single room on the same floor as their kitchen that was simultaneously a lounge, a library and a general entertainment space; along one wall, furthest from the door, was a bank of four cumbersome terminals separated by a partition in between each to give the user a sense of privacy while they read and stretched along another was a massive couch, a scattering of chairs in the center. Opposite the library, on the other side of the room, was a screen mounted on the wall, a game station about as tall as Nott standing in the corner (it was a Xeno Circuit which wasn’t a bad company, but Fjord definitely had more experience playing on a Unit Pi instead; he found that most freighters and cargo ships had one).

This was where Fjord inevitably wound up when he wasn’t in the cockpit or attempting to get some rest in the room he shared with Molly (who wound up being fairly uncomplicated as far as roommates went). Caleb seemed to spend an awful lot of time here as well, which Fjord assumed would change once they started collecting data and samples from the wreckage, from the ‘point-of-origin’—as the man with the glasses had put it—of the creature they were after.

There are no windows anywhere except in the cockpit but Fjord finds himself staring at the wall when he’s on the couch, imagining what was out there anyway. He’d asked Caleb at one point what sort of animals they were driving past, out here in the dark.

“Sponges. Holothurians. Starfish. Mollusks. Bacteria. A variety of worms,” Caleb had listed. “There are a number of fish and certain peracarid crustaceans, including the one our ship was modeled after. And, of course, our massive friend.”

“It’s a little spooky, don’t you think?” Fjord had wondered out loud and Caleb had made a noise to let Fjord know he had heard him. He was listening. “That the water is teeming with all of that, just out there”—Fjord pointed at the wall—”But we can’t see any of it.”

“I wouldn’t say it is ‘teeming’,” Caleb said, talking more to his computer screen than to Fjord, who didn’t respond right away. He finally turns, just enough, to stare at the side of Fjord’s head. “But I do agree it can feel a bit unsettling if you think too hard about it.”

‘A bit unsettling’, Fjord thought, was the understatement of the entire mission.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord is in the cockpit on the morning of day three with Molly standing behind him (he had a tendency to show up whenever Fjord was in there, as if he had some sort of second sense, and Fjord had never asked what he got out of standing there, looking at nothing since the the shielding was down) when one of the windows on the center console starts bleeping at him and then the _Bathynomus_ comes to a sudden halt without Fjord having to tell it to.

“Looks like we’re here,” Fjord says.

“Or at least that’s what the ship is telling us,” Molly replies. Fjord moves some things around, looks down at the monochromatic images from the exterior camera feeds. He slowly, slowly increases the outside lights but it doesn’t do much to help; he still sees pale sand, darkness that must have been the ocean, and formless shapes on the ground just a few feet away.

“I guess we’ll have to get a better look.” He flips the switch and the shielding over the window retracts. Washed in white light, settled on the sand, is a ship much, much smaller than the one they were currently sitting in, on it’s side, a gaping hole in the hull. Still visible, painted just underneath, unscathed as if the creature had _wanted_ them to see it, is the name ‘ _Johnsonii_ ’.

 

& & & &

 

“So, what do we know?”

They’re in the rec room since it’s the largest space on board—other than the engine room—that they could assemble in without feeling like they were on top of each other. On the screen is one of the feeds from the cameras but nothing had changed since they’d come to a halt ten minutes ago and, beside it, is a mock-up of what the ship was _supposed_ to look like: round and slightly distended in the front, thinned out in the back to an angled point, a hinge splitting it from the body, meant to move side-to-side like a fish tail. ( _Humpback anglerfish_ , Fjord hears Caleb murmur.)

“We know what they told us,” Fjord answers. Someone had pulled the couch away from the wall, turned it towards the screen and Beau is sitting on the back of it, her feet on the cushions, Nott and Jester on either side of her legs. Caleb and Molly had chosen chairs for themselves and the third one is left unused, Yasha choosing to lean a shoulder against the wall now void of a piece of furniture, her arms crossed. They were all facing Fjord where he’d placed himself near the screen, the remote gripped in one hand, a tablet with the information packet that L&N had sent them in the other. “And what we saw.”

“What I’m seeing _now_ ,” Beau says, gesturing towards the screen, “Is that there’s a huge-ass chunk missing from the ship. Which they definitely did _not_ tell us about.” They all know _why_ they weren’t told: because nobody knew. Fjord had a lot of questions about that, chiefly: why couldn’t they send down an unmanned vessel in the direct spot that the _Johnsonii_ was lost? If anything, it would have given them more information to work with other than a grainy, cut-up transmission. But here they were, staring at a wreckage with a large chunk of time missing from its history.

“Do you think the creature did that?” Jester asks. The bottoms of her feet are pushed together, knees sticking out, and she holds the toes of her shoes with one hand.

“It could have happened during the attack,” Yasha says. “It got knocked around the terrain. I’m assuming.”

“We’ll be able to find out once we get a closer look,” Fjord says. “And we’re not going to get one with just the exterior cameras. As far as I know, they expect us to suit up and go in there. But I don’t want to do that until we have a better idea of what we’re walking into.”

“We’ve got a drone ship,” Beau says. Fjord remembers seeing one on the schematics, tucked away in it’s own separate room on the same floor as the engine. “We send it in, let it sniff around for a bit first. And then we, you know, send a few of us down there in suits. I should probably go,” she adds quickly, as if she expected someone to tell her she had to stay on board. “I mean, if we’re looking for anything that’s still hanging around, I’ll know how to rip it out.”

“I’ll go,” Yasha volunteers.

“Alright,” Fjord says. “I’d like to be there as well. And, if there’s an off-chance that the creature left something of itself behind, I think it’d be beneficial for Caleb to come along, too. Since you’ll know exactly what to look for,” he directs that last part to Caleb, who immediately ruffles, his shoulders tensing, a look on his face like he had been hoping that, if he were quiet enough, they might have forgotten that he was there.

“I don’t think— I’m not entirely suited for— If you find anything with the drone, I could point it out. It would be easy enough for one of you to collect it, would it not?” He asks. Fjord glances to Nott and she misinterprets his look to her as _what about you_ and not _back me up here, he’ll probably listen to you_.

“Me? Oh no. Absolutely not. The only reason I’m even here is because Caleb is. I hate the water. I don’t swim.”

“If you’re worried about something happening to you out there, I can assure you, I’ve got your back,” Fjord says. “But of course, if you’re really uneasy about doing it, I’m sure the three of us can manage.”

“I—” Caleb starts but then lets out a slow sigh when Frumpkin comes wandering into the room and hops up on his lap. He deflates. “Fine. But only for a few minutes. And I want Yasha to bring her gun.” Fjord is about to say that he understands Caleb’s anxiety, that the thought of the creature simply lurking somewhere out there, watching them, has been skittering like an agitated beetle in the back of his head—it probably has been for everyone—but he doesn’t get a chance because Yasha simply says:

“Sure.”

“Molly?” Fjord looks over to where he was sitting, his legs stretched out as far as they could go without taking the rest of him completely off the seat, his ankles crossed.

“Yes, dear?”

“Any thoughts? Objections?” Fjord asks.

“It all sounds good to me,” he says, folding his hands behind his head. “And I am quite content where I am right now, thank you. Five’s a crowd. Although you can definitely count me in for Round Two.”

“Jester?” Fjord looks to her next.

“Well…” Jester bobs her head from side to side a bit, drags the word out, a verbal tic he’s noticed she does a lot. “Since I’m _clearly_ stuck in here, I would _at least_ like to be the one to drive that drone around.”

“Have you ever driven one of them before?”

“ _Yes_ , Beau,” Jester says, with the tone of a girl who had just been asked by her much older sister if she _really_ thought that she was old enough to see that scary movie she begged to be taken to.

“Then that’s settled,” Fjord says.

“I’ll go check the drone over and then kick the guy out the door,” Beau says, hopping down from her perch and disappearing out the door, her heavy footfalls echoing as she climbs down the ladder.

 

& & & &

 

Beau has returned to her position on the back on the couch but, this time, Jester has moved up to join her and she has a small, rectangular device balanced in her lap, a singular joystick sticking up out of the center, her blue fingers wrapped tightly around it. Filling up the screen is the the view from the drone ship—the camera is in black-and-white night vision, but it’s much crisper than the ones affixed to the _Bathynomus_ and it starts to drift slightly, wobble from side to side but, with a combination of self-correcting and Jester’s hand, it straightens out and continues on its way towards the wreckage.

Jester takes it clockwise along the outside, doesn’t get too close at first, but then moves it, does the same loop, focuses on the gaping hole in the side, exploring the jagged edges.

“What do you make of that?” Fjord asks Caleb and, even though he could see it clear enough from his seat, Caleb stands from it, walks right up to the screen, tells Jester to _hold_. She keeps the joystick straight, her fingers just barely touching it, allowing the drone to hover in place. Caleb crosses an arm over his middle, rests the elbow of his left arm in his palm, touches his mouth with his index finger as he studies the image.

“This was not a battering from the terrain,” he says eventually. “You see there. And there.” He points, first to an area where the hull and a few craggy edges were bent inwards, swipes the tip of his finger down to where others seemed to have been peeled outwards. “This looks like something had bitten down on the ship and pulled back. Tore the section off.”

“So where is it?” Beau asks and Jester grips the joystick again, takes the drone out a ways from the _Johnsonii_ in a seemingly random direction but all there is is more of nothing at all. But then:

“There,” Yasha says and it takes them a moment to see it but, buried in the sand, is a piece of the ship. Jester lowers the drone, tries to use it’s underbelly to dig it out, swipes nauseatingly back and forth in an attempt to create enough movement to clear the sand. There’s more of it, just ahead.

“Hansel and Gretel,” Fjord hears Caleb say.

“Don’t go too far,” Fjord warns. It would be easy to get turned around out here and they couldn’t afford to lose this; they had been told to also check on—what they had defined as—the creatures ‘point-of-origin’ and Fjord has a feeling that they might need to send the drone out for that, too. Molly had mentioned something about _round two_ , but Fjord couldn’t imagine _anyone_ wanting to go anywhere near where that thing may have left just in case it decided to come back.

Jester stops, hovers again. The light from the drone only extends so far and the fragments from the ship disappear into the darkness.

“Well,” Beau says, “At least we have some idea what direction it might have gone in.” She leans over, shoulder touching Jester’s, looks down at the device in her lap. There are a series of small buttons on the smooth surface and she presses a few of them. “I saved the path Jester just took. We can take the _Bath_ out this way now, if we really want. Just gotta plug it into your magic computer.”

“Take us back to the ship,” Fjord says. “Please, Jester.”

“Yes, sir,” Jester says and the drone turns, retreating back from whence it came and Jester approaches the _Johnsonii_ again, arranges it over the breach and slowly, slowly starts to fly it inside.

There isn’t very much to see. There are no floors here; it’s one large, floating metal box in the shape of a fish. The crew hadn’t come down here with any intent to stay longer than a few days. It had been a basic research mission and nothing more (or so it appeared to be). Six cots, three to a stack, are screwed into the walls, cramped near the back towards the tail and further up is a row of cabinets and a fold out table. The cockpit, in the distended jowl of the ship, remains surprisingly intact. Bottles, jars, basic scientific equipment litter the sand, having spilled out from where they were housed during the attack. Wires long since devoid of a spark hang free, loose and barely moving. There was only one thing glaringly missing from what they were seeing.

“How many people were in there?” Nott questions.

“Five,” Fjord says. Beau leans forward slightly, forearms pressed against her thighs.

“So where the fuck are they?” There were lockers, but they were barely wide enough to fit Nott inside unless she was holding her breath; nowhere were there the bulky exploratory suits required for the kind of work outside of a Deep Ocean Craft, which meant that they could have gotten dressed and attempted to swim away but, without a ship and a way to call for help, it was unlikely any of the crew would have survived, even if the creature hadn’t gone for them directly. But, if they hadn’t had a chance to get protected, even the smallest crack in the hull would have been it, unless they had repaired it in time. The bodies shouldn’t have floated very far—there was too much pressure, barely a breeze.

There should have been five drowned.

But there was nothing.

“That’s enough,” Fjord says, a strange heaviness in his chest. “We need to get in there.”

 

& & & &

 

There are only three spaces in the very bottom of the ship: the engine room, the space for the drone, and the room where their suits are stored. The latter is where they currently find themselves.

The walls are pale white and smooth, the ceiling and walls curved slightly and, lining one side, are seven exploratory suits in various sizes, held up in their own separate cubbies, the dark grey material that they’re made oddly smooth. L&N logos are stamped on either shoulder and the suits look as if someone had sheard as much heft off of them so as to not sacrifice both elegance or practicality.

Fjord walks over to one, runs his hand over the material. It feels rubbery. There are four bands of metal around each arm, two around the waist, another four folded around each leg. An array of small devices are sewn in under the surface, just barely bulging out—sensors, monitors, the inner workings—in an attempt to not spoil the otherwise polished look. He lifts the suit off of the hooks and its heavier than he he was expecting, his arms dipping slightly with the weight. Putting it back, he lowers himself onto the small bench in the bottom of his cubby and starts to remove his boots. Yasha does the same—resting her enormous gun (brought, just as requested) against the side of her cubby before she sits—and then Beau and then, finally, reluctantly, Caleb.

(He’d shown up with a dark red sphere about the size of his own head, which he only puts down just long enough to get changed. When Fjord had asked what it was, Caleb replied: _you’ll see_.)

The other three stand there watching, waiting in case they ask for assistance but the suits had been built to make it easy to climb into on one’s own. Even so, once they were all dressed, Molly walks up to each of them individually, inspects the seals on the front to make sure they were closed right, grabs their helmets to check for cracks in the clear material over their faces, turns them this way and that to confirm that they’re secure. He starts with Yasha, pats her shoulder when he finishes, moves on to Beau and smacks the side of her helmet with a closed fist. With Caleb, he puts fingers on his arm, pulls away and gives him a thumbs up and then he finishes with Fjord. Curling all but his index finger in, Molly jabs it against Fjord’s chest.

“Don’t get lost.” Fjord can just barely hear him. “Same goes for the rest of you. Even you,” Molly says, pointing the same finger at Beau, who pushes up her middle one in response.

“Okay,” Fjord says and then realizes that they likely couldn’t hear him. He presses a button on the side of his helmet and tries again. “Okay. Can you all hear me?” The three in their suits acknowledge him, the three outside do as well. “Good.”

Jester walks over to Caleb, puts a hand on his shoulder, holds the other to something hanging around her neck that Fjord had never noticed before, and quietly speaks. She pulls away and doesn’t do it for anyone else.

“What was that?” Caleb asks.

“It’s a blessing. It will help to keep you hidden. So, see? You are safe.” She smiles at him.

“Thank you,” Caleb tells her, more because it seems he figures it was the right thing to say than anything else.

“Hey,” Beau calls out, “How come he gets that and not me?”

“Oh. Well.” Jester offers a small shrug. “I can only use it once a day and I figured that Caleb could really use it the most.”

“‘Once a day’? They really work like that?” Beau asks.

“They do for the Traveler,” Jester says and leaves it at that.

“The Traveler,” Caleb repeats. “I have never heard of this ‘Traveler’. Is he… Is he someone from your species or—?”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Molly says.

“Oh, no. The Traveler is just with me right now I _think_ but he _will_ have more followers soon,” Jester says and she speaks of him like she’s smitten. “He’s _super_ _great_ and he—”

“Maybe later?” Fjord cuts in.

“Fine,” Jester says, only slightly discouraged at being cut short. “But I think you will all _really_ like him.”

After that, Jester, Molly, and Nott move to one of the far walls where there’s a panel that Molly starts moving his fingers across. There’s a low rumble, a minor shaking, and then a clear tube descends from the ceiling, locks into place in a circle around the hatch in the floor. There’s a door on it, barely visible, and it opens, waiting for its first passenger. Holding her gun close to her chest, Yasha steps inside first, the door closes on its own with a hiss as the air and pressure regulates and then, without any warning, the hatch releases and Yasha goes plummeting into the ocean.

 _Ca-chunk_. The hatch closes. The tube’s door opens. _Next_.

Beau steps in and, just as a few seconds before: _Slam. Hiss. Woosh._ Gone. _Ca-chunk. Next._

Caleb, cursing to himself, follows suit, a flush of nerves on his cheeks, concern in his eyes, which he squeezes shut as soon as the tube starts to make the noise just before the hatch opens. He starts to say something, loud, but he only gets the first syllable out ( _WA—!_ ) before he, too, plunges into the water.

That leaves Fjord.

There’s an ear-ringing silence when he steps into the tube and the door shuts in his face. Squaring his shoulders, he takes a deep breath in and out through his nose, fogging up the inside of his helmet briefly. He turns, staring at the three staring right back at him and he keeps his gaze fixed on them the entire time, watches their expressions. _If they’re not worried, then I don’t need to be either_.

One second, two, three, four, five, six.

The feeling of the ground dropping out from underneath him sends his stomach temporarily to his throat. The last thing he sees is Jester giving him a thumbs-up before it all disappears and he’s completely swallowed by darkness.

 

& & & &

 

Despite the illumination from the _Bathynomus_ and the lights in his own helmet—as well as the others—it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust. The world outside of the scattered spotlights is void. There are no stars down here.

The metal rings around the suit turn out to be weights—not heavy enough to keep him from moving but enough to stop him from drifting away. He takes a step forward and then another. His feet just barely touch the sand and it swirls around him as he moves; he lowers himself slightly into a half-squat, launches himself up, but the suit only allows him to go a couple feet before it stops him.

He sees movement just to his left, turns his whole body and sees Yasha float up beside him, still holding her gun.

“The other two are by the _Johnsonii_ already,” she tells him, but—even with his enhanced vision—it’s difficult to see for himself; the external lights on their own ship reached out less than forty feet (the lights on their suits far, far less than even that) and it had stopped itself twenty-five feet away from the _Johnsonii_. Yasha must have gone with them and then come back to wait for Fjord, to make sure he could find his way. It was a nice gesture, albeit an unnecessary one; Fjord could see in the dark slightly better than most—not perfectly, not crystal clear, but enough of a difference that he could have found his way on his own.

Leaning the top half of her body forward, Yasha bends her knees, picking her feet up off the ocean floor and then kicks her legs out, surging forward, letting the momentum carry her as she moves in the direction of the wreckage. Fjord follows, catches up to her, uses the hull and the suit to stop himself from continuing for eternity into the nothingness around them.

He can make out the forms of his companions, their faces, the shape of the vessel they were floating beside.

“Here we go,” Caleb says and, in the pale darkness, the three of them watch as he splits open the sphere he had been clutching and four smaller ones come flying out, immediately brightening with a soft, white light. He folds the now hollow, empty orb, attaching it to the belt of his suit. The lights hover in the space around him. Touching one of them, he pushes it towards Beau and she reaches a hand up to stop it, keep it by her. He gives Yasha and Fjord one of their own as well and keeps the last for himself.

“I’ve never seen these things before,” Fjord says.

“Dancing Lights,” Caleb says.

“Handy.” Beau grips hers with two hands, holds onto it and then sends it forward into the ship, following behind. Before going inside, Caleb unclips a rectangular device from the belt, pushes a button to turn it on and it starts to glitter with a medley of colors, rising and falling lines on the small screen. He starts to run it slowly, counterclockwise around the jagged edges of the hole and Fjord decides to stick by him instead of Beau. As the others set to work, Yasha moves about a foot away from the _Johnsonii_ , turns her back to them and hovers, staring off in the direction that they had found the trail of broken ship pieces.

Caleb grunts and murmurs, the device telling him things that only he understood, Beau grumbles softly to herself and, just underneath that, Fjord can hear Yasha’s steady breathing. He turns the channel off for a moment, knows they were all close enough that if someone found something, they could easily grab his attention, and switches it to the channel that filtered in the crew members they had left inside the ship.

“—ellooooo?” He hears a familiar voice, right in the middle of a word she might have been echoing until someone heard her.

“Howdy, Jester,” Fjord says.

“ _There_ you are,” she says with a heavy, put-upon breath. “So, how’s it going out there? Find anything cool yet?”

“So far so good,” Fjord replies. “And no, not yet.”

“Phooey,” she says.

“How are things in there?” He asks. Caleb’s disappeared into the ship now, his Dancing Light trailing behind, and Fjord tags along, his own light coming with him. He’s going over the discarded lab equipment, examining the bottles, his mouth pulled into a frown. It’s cramped, his helmet just barely hitting what would have been a wall but now functioned as a ceiling. He can see Beau now, crouched down in the belly of the cockpit, the bottom of the console ripped open, her arms and head deep inside.

“Oh, you know,” Jester is saying. “We’re just hanging out, waiting for you to come back. I tried to play cards with Nott again but she’s too nervous about Caleb.”

“What about Molly?”

“Molly,” Molly says, “Only gambles if he knows he’s going to win. And that I’m taking money from the right people.”

“Good to know,” Fjord says. “Hey, uh, look. I should probably switch back over. I’ll check in again in a little while.” There’s a brief moment before he shifts back where he can’t hear anybody but himself and the suit. It’s making a soft sort of _beep, beep, beep_ almost like a warning but he was breathing fine, he didn’t feel strange, his head not popping from an increase in pressure. He _could_ call up the HUD, try to figure out what the suit was so worried about but, as far as Fjord knew, it was a noise it was _supposed_ to be making. He makes a mental note to check on it once they were back on board and then tunes to the other channel just in time to hear Beau say:

“What the fuck?”

“What is it?” Fjord asks. Caleb stops what he’s doing—which, currently, was going over the six cots in the back of ship with his device—glancing over to where Beau is now kneeling, her entire body now pulled from the innards of the console. Yasha doesn’t move from her sentry but he knows that she must be listening, too.

“Well, back when the drone was flying around I had wondered why the containment buffer wasn’t up. And even with this guy literally dead in the fuckin’ water, it should’ve been. They run on an entirely different system. Some of ‘em have enough juice to last for months without power. So when I started digging around it was the first thing I checked on and, well. I know why it didn’t come on. ‘Cause it’s gone.”

“Gone?” Fjord questions. “‘Gone’ as in: it never had one or ‘gone’ as in: someone took it out?”

“Dunno,” Beau says. “I mean, they’re kinda the same thing, right? There’s something else there instead, though, which is the weird part. The weird _er_ part.” Fjord leaves Caleb to move over towards Beau. Now that he’s noticed it, the beeping from within his suit is getting obnoxious but he doesn’t know how to turn it off. He tries to tune it out. “Somebody hid a second hard drive in there.”

“This _was_ a research vessel,” Fjord reminds her. “It could have been added to hold more data.”

“They weren’t doing complicated mathematics. Besides, they have a FEELID. It’s part of the Watchmaster Series, I think? I’m not a nerd. I just know enough to know what I’m looking at. This shit,” she points in the wire-filled cavern she had created, “Looks way too fancy.”

“Can you get it out?” His query is met with a shift of her arms that might have been an attempt at a shrug but then she says:

“No. I thought I’d just leave it in there forever.” She turns her head, the side of it pressing into her helmet, and gives him a deadpan expression.

“Yeah, alright,” he says, leaves her to it, telling to call out if she needs an extra pair of hands and then wanders back over to Caleb, who’s now made it to the other side of the back-end of the ship. He’s running the device over the edges of the hole again, double-checking or in disbelief that there was nothing there.

“How’re you doin’?” Fjord asks, coming up right beside him.

“Mhm,” is his only response.

“Yasha?”

“Still here,” she says. “I was thinking…” She pauses.

“Thinking what?” Fjord encourages.

“I was thinking of maybe going a little further out. Just a few feet. Get a better look at the pieces of scrap that you found.” Fjord mulls it over, gives the other two a chance to object but Beau is busy grunting and Caleb merely glances to Fjord, looking nervous. He’d made it clear that he wasn’t in charge and yet they kept looking to him for the final word.

“That stuff isn’t going anywhere,” he says eventually, “I think for now, maybe you’d better stay put. At least until Caleb is back inside.”

“Alright,” she responds. He tries to detect annoyance or discontent in her voice when she says it but there is none. She’d made a suggestion and gotten her answer. That was that.

“ _Son of a bitch!_ ” Beau exclaims with frustration. Fjord leaves Caleb again to maneuver towards her. “This thing is _really_ fuckin’ wedged in here.”

“Here,” Fjord says and, with some effort, kneels down beside her. The two of them dig their gloved hands into the mouth created in the console and Beau blindly grabs his right one, directs it towards the hard drive which is pushed far into the back, crammed behind bulky metal pieces of tech that were long since waterlogged and useless. They start to pull. “What about the… what’d you call it? The Feelid?”

“Nah,” Beau says. “Thing is crushed. Most of this stuff— _Nngh_. Come on!” They keep tugging, push down on the edge of the hard drive and start wiggling it back and forth. Inch by inch, it starts to move. Yasha asks if they need a hand but Fjord declines. They almost had it, he could feel it loosening. “Most of this stuff isn’t made to survive being drowned.”

“Seems a bit counter-intuitive.”

“Yeah, well, what do you expect from a— Hang on. Hang on, I think we’ve—” One final massive yank and the hard drive breaks free, the two of them toppling as far backwards as the suit will let them. Once they’ve righted themselves, Beau holds the hard drive away from her chest, giving it a once over. It’s about as wide as Fjord’s palm but slightly longer and, at first, it looks black but—when Beau holds it closer to the light—he can see that it’s actually a very deep midnight blue. The only distinguishing marks Fjord can see from where he is is a single port in the side and a symbol he didn’t recognize stamped on one corner.

Beau flips it over so the bottom is facing up and then reaches for her Dancing Light, pulling it close.

“What the hell is a ‘PUMAT501’?” She asks. There’s a brief silence and then, from Caleb:

“Say that again?” Beau repeats the name, says it slower. “That is very expensive hardware.”

“How expensive?” Beau asks.

“Five-hundred.”

“Five-hundred what?”

“Gold,” Caleb clarifies, to which Beau responds with: “Holy shit. Anybody know if one of these scientists were millionaires?”

“Not off the top of my head,” Fjord says. Beau stands up first, holds her arm down, palm open towards Fjord and it takes him a moment to figure out what she’s doing but then he grabs onto her and she helps to haul him to his feet.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord sends Beau and Caleb back up first, with a promise that she’d open up the hard drive as soon as she was out of her suit ( _Nott can help her_ , Caleb had said, before disappearing up into the hatch). Yasha’s about to pull herself up after him when Fjord stops her.

“You wanna go for a walk?” She blinks at him and maybe he could have worded that better, been more specific, but then she nods, just the once. “Hey, guys,” Fjord says to whoever was listening. “Yasha and I are gonna go explore that scrap trail, see if we can find anything useful.” There’s a crackle from the other end and, for a moment, Fjord thinks that he’d forgotten to switch the channels and had just said all that to Yasha or, worse, himself, but then he hears Molly.

“Go nuts.” A pause. “Need directions?”

“No,” Yasha says before Fjord has a chance to reply.

They turn around and go back the way they came, the Dancing Lights still with them, following close behind.

 

& & & &

 

The _Bathynomus_ is a beacon in the distance.

They haven’t gone that far, but the emptiness between them and it makes it feel like it’s miles away.

“You know,” Fjord says, “You didn’t have to bring your weapon. You could have sent it up with one of the others.”

“Forgot I was carrying it,” Yasha replies. She walks another couple feet and then comes to an abrupt halt. Coming up beside her, Fjord looks down and, at their feet, is the first missing piece from the _Johnsonii_ that Jester had uncovered with the drone. Crouching down, Yasha wipes her gloved hand over it, brushing it clean, and then curls her fingers around one of the sharp edges and pulls it up. Other than the fact that it’s this far away from the ship, there’s nothing remarkable about it which, in of itself, is somewhat remarkable.

Yasha lets the piece she’s holding go and moves forward to the next breadcrumb but it’s more of the same. She keeps going, digs up a third, a fourth fragment and Fjord follows, prepares to warn her, to _say something_ because he doesn’t want to go too far when Yasha—still crouched down and just a step or two away from the fifth piece—stops. She stands up to her full height, stares off into the nothing ahead of them and Fjord steps up next to her.

“What is it?” He asks and then watches her lift her gun, hoist the butt against her shoulder, the barrel pointing forward but her finger nowhere near the trigger. She looks into the scope as if she could actually see anything through it and, just like before, the only noise he can hear from her is her steady breathing. A creeping, crawling sensation starts to make it’s way down Fjord’s back, but he’s unsure if it’s because he’s just picked up on the same thing Yasha apparently did or it’s simply his body assuming what it _should_ be feeling instead. “Yasha.” After another couple agonizingly long seconds, she points her weapon towards the sand.

“I don’t know,” She says, still looking forward. “I thought… Hm. We should go back.”

“Alright,” Fjord says. He’s finding he’s having trouble turning his back on the expanse Yasha had just aimed her firearm at but he does, because walking backwards wasn’t particularly appealing either. “We should take one of these pieces back with us.”

“What for?”

“Might be useful,” Fjord says. “Could have something on it for Caleb. Or maybe not, but there’s no harm in it.”

The second chunk of the hull is the smallest one they could find without looking for the rest further out and, as Yasha is tucking it under her right arm, slinging her gun over her shoulder, resting down her back like a closed wing, Fjord hears a _ping ping_ in his helmet, different than the continuous beeping. It’s someone from the ship, trying to get the attention of either or both of them.

“We’ve got a problem,” Beau says as soon as she’s aware that Fjord is listening. Fjord gets Yasha’s attention, taps the side of his helmet and she nods.

“What sort of problem?”

“The PUMAT wants a password to access it and, uh, I hate to point out the obvious, but we don’t have one.”

“Can you get around it?” Fjord asks. They’re still walking, moving through the water, the light of the _Bathynomus_ getting closer.

“It could be booby trapped,” he hears Nott say. “One wrong move and this whole thing could wipe itself clean. Or worse. I can’t just… start poking blindly around in there.”

“But you could figure it out?” There’s a moment of quiet from the other end of the line.

“Uh…” Not says. “I could _try_ but… if it doesn’t work…”

“There’s no timetable,” Fjord tells her. He doesn’t know that for sure; whether or not L&N knew this secondary hard drive was there is up in the air. They hadn’t asked for it specifically (and it didn’t seem like an object that—as much as they seemed to enjoy doing—they would conveniently leave out), which lead Fjord to already find himself leaning heavily towards the _didn’t know_ camp; if that were the case, they _did_ have the time to crack it open without concern over Fjord being asked about it at the end of the day when he tells them that they’d investigated the ship. What was on it would help him decide if he was going to say anything about it to them at all. “If you really don’t think you can—”

“I’ll do it,” Nott says quickly, with almost zero confidence. “I’ll check for traps. But if this goes bad, you are _not_ blaming me.” The channel is switched off from their end, effectively shutting down any possible further conversation until they were back on the _Bathynomus_.

 

& & & &

 

Molly is waiting for them once they come up through the hatch, standing casually by the same panel they had left him at when they’d fallen through the floor into the ocean. Saltwater puddles surround their feet and Molly retracts the tube before approaching them, but not quite getting close enough for the bottom of his coat to get wet. Beau and Caleb’s suits had been hung back where they came from, the benches _drip dripping_ and, resting on the floor between them, leaning against the partition, is the dark red sphere Caleb’s Dancing Lights had drifted out of; the ones that had come in with them fly back without being prompted and the sphere seals shut on it’s own.

“I see you brought another souvenir,” Molly says once their helmets are gone, indicates towards the piece of the _Johnsonii_ that Yasha had temporarily dropped on the ground while she peeled off her suit.

“Oh. Uh. Yeah. Could be worth a look,” he says. “At least by Caleb. Figured I’d drop it off at the lab for ‘im when he gets a chance. Maybe check up on Beau and Nott.”

“You sure you’re not the Captain?” Molly asks, taking Yasha’s suit from her without having to be asked, dragging it along behind him to hang it up.

“Why?” Fjord asks.

“Hm,” Molly hums as a way of a response. Fjord doesn’t push it, reaches down for the scrap that Yasha had put down and forgotten, having left shortly after putting her jacket back on—or had purposely left it after hearing Fjord say the words ‘I’d drop it off’. It’s heavier than he anticipated (he really shouldn’t have been all that surprised; things tended to feel lighter underwater and Yasha has made it clear she can easily carry cumbersome objects with little effort) but he hoists it under his arm anyway. He’s almost to the door when he hears Molly say: “Suit.”

Fjord halts, looks back at the cubbies and there are only six hanging on their hooks. He glances down at himself.

“Ah. Right.”

 

& & & &

 

A red light comes on when Fjord attempts to open the lab door. He tries again and it refuses to budge. Fjord knocks with his free hand, doesn’t consider that nobody might be in there, that Caleb had locked it behind him out of habit (or just because he could or, maybe, he was hiding something but Fjord couldn’t even begin to guess what it could be). Nothing happens for a moment and he’s going to walk away, leave the hefty piece of metal in the rec room or the kitchen for lack of anywhere else reasonable to leave it when the red light turns green.

“What is that?” Caleb asks, face peering around from the clunky machine he was sitting behind. He offers no justification nor apology for locking the door and Fjord doesn’t ask him for one. He clunks the piece of the _Johnsonii_ down onto the thick table in front of him. Calling this a lab, Fjord realizes now, is generous. He doesn’t know what half of the instruments and tech in this cramped space was supposed to do but even _he_ could tell that it looked outdated which—compared to the ship they were standing in—was practically absurd. It was like having the engine of a Vulbal-class shuttle inside of an MK1 Corvette: it’d get the job done—get you from Point A to Point B—but it wasn’t ideal and, with the right parts, you’d get there in half the time.

“From that trail Jester followed with the drone,” Fjord says.

“Ah.” Caleb stands, wanders over to the other side of the table, staring down at it, his head just slightly off to the side, studying it without touching it and Fjord watches him. He traces the craggy edges, finger hovering over the metal. “This wasn’t ripped apart,” he says eventually.

“What?” When Fjord asks that, Caleb jumps, just faintly, as if he had already forgotten that he was still there.

“It wasn’t…” He lifts his hands, palms open towards the ceiling for a moment. “These weren’t torn off, like the larger piece was. It fell apart.”

“Fell apart,” Fjord repeats. “Like from an acid?” He knows he should be at least partly offended that Caleb looks up at him with the face of someone who had assumed he would have to translate what saying it _fell apart_ might mean but Fjord just smiles lightly instead.

“Yes,” Caleb says. “Possibly. I would have to run some tests, of course, which might take awhile.” He’s focused on the scrap of metal again, leans closer towards one particularly jagged edge as if he’s noticed something specific. “Hmm.” He moves the pad of one finger towards something but then, from outside, they hear the sound of small feet moving quickly down the hall, getting closer and closer. A green figure goes past the open door, as if it had been going too fast to stop and then there’s a silence before slower footsteps come back and Nott stops in the doorway.

“There you are,” she says. Fjord’s not sure which one of them she’s talking to, but then she looks at Fjord.

“The good news is I managed to get that PUMAT open.”

“What’s the bad news?” Caleb asks.

“Who said there was bad news? I never said that,” Nott replies quickly, pushing out a nervous laugh. Neither of them say anything. It’s a staring match that only lasts a couple seconds. “We lost almost all of the data.”

“From this one,” Caleb says and now it’s Fjord and Nott’s turn to stare at _him_. “PUMATs make multiple copies of themselves. Or, I should say, what’s stored on them. There’s no way to know where it’s gone. But it’s not completely lost.”

“What do we have _now_ , Nott?” Fjord asks.

“Uh. A couple useless files. And a video.”

“A what?” Fjord says, takes a small step forward and Nott takes one back, “A video. What video?”

“I don’t— Hm. Well. I think you should just see it.”

 

& & & &

 

_I have five minutes before the next pulse is sent out. —The containment buffer is gone. Or maybe it was never in there. Jesus Christ, this is our third EM down here and we’ve only just noticed— The SPE was set way too high when we got on board. Jojur tried to turn it down but the damn ship just set it right back to where it was. I don’t know what they’re playing at up there but they— I’m keeping a record of this and I’m giving the PUMAT to my superior when we get the message to resurface. All of it. This isn’t—_

_What the—? It’s not supposed to— Shit. Goddammit. This ship is so goddamn broken. Laslin! Bren! I’m still—_

 

Fjord watches as just out of the corner of her helmet something—not black, but _ghost white_ —comes quickly out of the void and _bashes_ itself against the ship, sandwiching the person who was hovering near it in between. The woman lets out a scream, a crunching noise following suit and then the screen goes dark, deathly silent. For a moment, nobody in the room says anything. Caleb, from where he had been standing behind the couch, turns his entire body away, coughs, curls a loose fist and puts his bent index finger to his mouth, closing his eyes. The rest simply stare.

They hadn’t been able to see which one of the _Johnsonii_ crew had been talking, who had been dealt the first blow. She must have gone outside for privacy. He struggles to remember the recording that the man with the glasses had shown Fjord shortly after he’d accepted this job. He had about a hundred questions, none of which he figured he’d get an answer for from anybody here other than, maybe: who was that? There had been three women on board, Fjord remembers. She’d said three names in her transmission, so that narrowed it down even further, but the other two just weren’t coming to him. He had the manifest somewhere but that would mean going to find it. He doesn’t want to leave quite yet.

“What’s an SPE?” Nott asks quietly, asks it in a tone as if that wasn’t even _close_ to what she had wanted to say, but it was what had come out and she let it. There’s a tremor in her voice. It could be fear, but it might also be anger.

“Sonic Pulse Emitter,” Fjord replies when no one else does. “EM. That’s—”

“Exploratory Mission,” Nott says. “I know. People invite Caleb onto them all the time. But he always says no.” Except this time, apparently. Fjord glances at him. He’s fascinated by the empty wall, the one where the couch used to be. Fjord wonders, idly, why he had said yes.

“Is he alright?” Fjord inquires and Nott turns from where she’s seated, scrutinizes Caleb for a moment and then stands, walks over to him and carefully takes his hand, shakes his arm just a bit. He slowly, very slowly, looks down at her. He reaches up with his other hand, presses fingers behind his right ear and says something very softly. Nott frowns, nods just once and then lets her grip fall away, follows him with her gaze as he walks out of the room, keeps her eyes on the doorway until his footsteps had vanished.

“What did he say?” Jester asks, having observed the entire scene, her body turned around, leaning over the back of the couch. “Someone should go with him.” Nott just looks at her, shakes her head.

“He must have known, right?” Fjord uncrosses his arms, lets them hang but it doesn’t feel right and he puts them back where they were. “He understood what we were dealing with.”

“That’s not the problem,” Nott says, but she won’t elaborate, gives Fjord a look as if he should know what the issue is and that she’s pissed off that he doesn’t.

“Are we gonna, uh…” Beau says, gestures at the screen, “I don’t know. Talk about anything we just saw here?” Everyone stares at her, nearly simultaneously, and she lifts her hands, palms out. _Chill_. “I just mean, you know. The fact that she said the sonic pulse-thingy was set too high _before_ they got on board? And the whole ‘containment buffer is gone’. _Before_ _they got on board._ ”

“And all those missing people…” Fjord hears Jester murmur.

“Oh, we all heard that,” Molly says, replying to Beau. “What’s there to talk about?”

“They told us that somebody’s _finger slipped_ ,” Beau argues.

“And you _believed them_?” Molly counters, although Beau never claimed she did. “That was your first mistake. Anybody who makes that much money and is that secretive before hiring you is misleading you. About everything.”

“Then why the hell are you even here if you hate these people so much?” Beau snaps.

“Long story,” Molly says, quickly changes the subject. “They must have known you’d find out about the containment buffer being missing, which means they knew they’d have an excuse for it prepared once Fjord brings it up during his evening tête-à-tête.”

“If I tell them,” Fjord says and now the attention has been shifted to him instead of Beau. It had slipped out and, up until this point, he hadn’t even been sure if that was what he wanted. The hard drive, perhaps, but the rest of what they found… Or _didn’t_ find as the case may be. He waits for someone to object, a _we really need to tell them_ , but there’s nothing, almost as if they, too, were waiting for a voice to explain to them that that was a bad idea.

“They’re already keeping a lot from us,” Yasha says, filling the silence.

“Two can play at that game,” Nott says.

“I want to hear what they have to say,” Beau speaks up. “Call them out.”

“They’ll just lie again,” Nott says.

“So what? We’ll get ‘em on that, too.” She rolls her shoulders. “I don’t like being jerked around.”

“We play it close to the chest,” Fjord counters. “See if it gets their dander up. See what happens. If we don’t like it, then we can try it your way next check-in. Sound good?” Beau looks like she wants to keep fighting but then she sighs, scowling.

“Fine. Yeah. I guess. Play dumb.”

“I’m all for ruffling the feathers of some likely government-funded liars,” Molly says.

“I think this will be fun,” Jester says.

“Caleb,” Fjord says to Nott, “He will—?”

“He will,” Nott says. Fjord takes a moment, looks to each of them, not sure what he’s searching for in their faces and they look back at him with varying degrees of eye contact. He draws in heavily through his nose, tries to find a clock but, despite the sheer number of _screens_ in the room, he’s having trouble locating one. A cleared throat and he turns his head in the direction it had come from, sees Beau holding up the tablet that had been resting on her legs. Three in the afternoon. Seven more hours until he had to check in.

“And no offense,” Beau says, lowering the tablet and they all know what starting a sentence off with that means but she’s going to power through it anyway, “But I want one of us to be there this time when you talk to whoever it is you talk to.”

“You don’t trust me?” Fjord asks. Beau snorts.

“I’ve only known you for, like, four days, dude,” she says. “Or something like that. But you haven’t fucked with us yet or anything. You seem cool. But, you know.” Beau shrugs.

“That’s fair,” Fjord says because it, ultimately, was. There’s a shift of the stony expression she perpetually carried on her face as if she had been expecting to be hassled about it and was surprised she hadn’t gotten one. “I’ll be in there at ten. You send who you want.”

“Okay.”

“Alright.” Fjord nods and an awkward silence settles over the room. “You said there were other files on the hard drive?” He directs the question to Nott.

“I said there were _useless_ files,” Nott reminds him.

“You looked at them already.”

“Of course we did,” Nott says. “It’s all junk. Two of them are corrupt and the other is just full of weird numbers.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Fjord says, “But I’d like to—”

_Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep._

Somebody was trying to contact them.

“They know,” Jester whispers loudly, as if she thinks they’ve been listening in the entire time but had been biding that same amount of time until what they felt was the exact right moment to call.

“They don’t know,’ Fjord assures her but, less than half a second after the words had left him, Molly says:

“Don’t listen to him. Always assume they know more than you think they do.” He lets his gaze sweep from Jester to Fjord, finishes his sentence off staring at him. _Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bl—_

“I should…” Fjord turns abruptly, starts to walk out and he hears the padding of bare feet following close behind.

 

& & & &

 

“Good afternoon, _Bathynomus_ ,” the voice on the other end says as soon as Fjord opens the line. It’s not someone Fjord has heard from before; up until now, it had been fairly consistent: it was Elva or it was a young man with the hint of a speech impediment that still hadn’t quite been corrected. This one sounded older, authoritative and, for a second, Fjord thinks it might be Stodiana but there’s something _off_ about it. It could just be the connection, even though it’s been fairly clear so far. “Is everything alright?”

“Of course,” Fjord says. “Why do you ask?” There’s a pause that barely lasts a second, but it’s long enough for both Fjord and Beau—who had come into the cockpit with him, made it clear that she had no plans on being forced out unless he wanted to try and pick her up _which_ , she had laughed, _good luck with that_ —to notice.

“We just wanted to make sure nothing had gone wrong.”

Subtly as he could, without leaving too much dead air, Fjord checks the string of numbers that the ship had turned the call’s origination into, but it was the same as it always has been. He wasn’t sure why he thought it might be different, what about it made him think that _maybe_ this was an intrusion and that someone other than L &N had managed to catch on to their signal to check up on them. It was possible, he supposes, for someone to trick the ship into thinking the connection was coming from one place when it was really coming from another, but Fjord doesn’t know much about how that works and, besides, that line of thinking just lead to a widening hole of paranoia. Once you crawl in there, it can be difficult to get out.

They weren’t exactly making it easy for any of them to avoid it, though; as usual, they danced around using specific terms and phrases. It was put together in a way that, if Fjord said it himself, asked: _You know where we are? You’re tracking us?_ They could simply respond: _We never said that._

Fjord clears his throat. “We found the _Johnsonii_ ,” he says. “I apologize. I didn’t know you wanted us to let you know when we’d found it. I had said it would take about two days to get there and... Well. I assumed simply informing you at the end of today would be sufficient.” _I assumed_ , Fjord implies, _that you’d be smart enough to use context clues to figure out why we had stopped after the amount of time I told you it would take before we reached our first destination._ There’s a lengthy quiet this time after he finishes speaking. Either the person on the other end of the line just realized she revealed a card the company had been keeping close too early or she heard the innuendo in his short speech, loud and clear.

“What have you found?” Fjord feels Beau tense behind him. He takes a chance, tests the waters.

“We’ve only done a cursory investigation with the drone ship,” he says. “I’m sure we could just send you the information it collected.”

“Do that,” comes the response. It’s difficult to tell, with miles of ocean and technology between them, if the voice believes what he’d claimed or not. “We wanted to talk to you before you went to explore the creature’s point-of-origin. Unless you’ve already…?” They had to have known that the hadn’t. He doesn’t know why she’s asking.

“We have not.”

“Good. What was your plan?”

“Our plan,” Fjord repeats. He hadn’t thought of that yet, not past ‘use the drone’, hadn’t gotten the rest of the crew together to discuss what they thought their options were—the safest but most advantageous course of action—because that part of it was more complicated than exploring the wreckage of a small research vessel in the sand. “I think I would need to get a better idea of what we’re dealing with before I—”

“We want you to do it as soon as possible,” the voice interrupts. “Today.”

“Certainly,” Fjord says, tries to say something else but the woman talks over him again. Impatient.

“Take the _Bathynomus_ down into the trench. You’ll get better readings that way.”

“The _entire_ ship?” Fjord asks. “I understand that this is capable of withstanding a bit of punishment but we don’t know what we’d be dropping down into. That area is unmapped.”

“We’re aware of that,” the voice says, “But it must be sizeable. The creature that came out of there is bigger than you are”—Fjord gets flashes of images, the woman in the suit, her scream as her body was smashed into a metal hull—“There shouldn’t be a problem. And, as you said, the _Bathynomus_ can endure quite a bit of abuse.”

“Forgive me, but I don’t think risking the entire ship when we’ve got a drone that could—”

“You’re forgiven,” the voice says, her tone clipped and unhumorous. “We believe this is your best option.”

“Yeah, but you’re not the ones who are actually gonna _do it_ ,” Beau criticizes from over Fjord’s shoulder and he closes his eyes, winces, waits for the reprimand, the _we said we only wanted to speak to you, Fjord_ , but, instead, all they get is:

“We’ve made ourselves clear. Send us the information from the drone.” And the connection is unceremoniously severed. Fjord thinks a moment, rubs at his jaw before turning his chair to face Beau.

“They’re tracking us,” Beau says. “They’ve gotta be. ‘Just making sure nothing had gone wrong’,” she reiterates mockingly. “The only reason they’d think something was wrong is because they could tell we weren’t moving.”

“But they don’t know where we are,” Fjord guesses. If they had, they wouldn’t have called to check in. They wouldn’t have needed to, unless they were testing them. _Stop it_ , he thinks. _Don’t start_.

“If that’s what they _want_ us to think,” Beau says and then frowns, wrinkling her nose slightly. “Ugh. God. I’m already starting to sound like Molly.” She untangles her arms from across her chest. “Either way, I don’t like it.”

“It’s not unreasonable that they’d want to keep an eye on us,” Fjord says, but then: “Me neither.” Was it the fact that they were tracking them at all that was bothering him or was it purely because they had hidden it? The latter, most likely. In theory, as he said, it made sense: they were under the water in an expensive piece of machinery. It would be easy for them, left to their own devices, to disappear either in a tragic accident or a last minute theft. Keeping track of them was a justifiable idea, one that Fjord was sure he would have consented to if it had been explained to him (although he couldn’t speak for the others). But the fact that they had kept it from them—same has how they’ve kept so much else behind a series of curtains and vague remarks—turned the act into something wholly suspicious. “How long would it take you to find something like that?”

“Shit, man,” Beau says, “I don’t know. I’m more of a bones and organs kind of gal. I have some _ideas_ of where one could be but that’s it.” The lift of one shoulder.

“Hm.” Fjord turns back towards the console, turns on the shipwide channel. “Nott.” They wait. One. Two. Three.

“…Yes?”

“Could you come up here to the cockpit for a moment?”

“Uhhhh…” Fjord takes that as a yes and cuts the communication.

“You’re not gonna tell the rest of them?” Beau asks.

“Not until I— Until _we_ know for sure.” If he tells them _they might be tracking us_ and not be able to tell them much else, it won’t do much to help—he’d have no ‘how’, no ‘how much do they know’. And then, if Nott can’t find it, he’d never have an answer. They’d either accept that he and Beau were wrong, or they’d spend the entire rest of the mission looking over their shoulder. (Maybe they should be even if they _do_ find what they’re looking for.)

“Yeah. Sure,” Beau says, chews on the inside of her cheek. While they wait, Fjord searches for the recording from the drone ship’s trip outside and sends it out into the ether.

( _You sure you’re not the Captain?_ He hears Molly’s voice in the back of his head.)

“Can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

“Funny,” Fjord says, waits. Beau shrugs at him again. _Go on_.

“Do you still see me as being in charge here?”

“What,” Beau says, “Like I _have_ to agree with you or something? Like that?”

“Like that.”

“Nah. You just make good points. And you’re like ‘I’m gonna do this’ and it sounds okay. But don’t fuckin’ worry, I’ll call you on your bullshit if you make a stupid decision. We all will.”

“Thanks,” Fjord says, adds a teaspoon of sarcasm to it but, underneath, he means it. Nott comes in slowly after that, cautiously, looks back and forth between the two of them and then lets her gaze flicker to the console.

“Was it about me? Am I in trouble?” She holds herself as if she’s preparing to run the _second_ she senses (or confirms) that her fears are correct. Fjord isn’t sure why, if she was so concerned, she even showed up at all.

“No,” Fjord says. Nott doesn’t look any less uncomfortable. “If there was a tracker on board, how long would it take you to find it?” It’s clearly not what she was expecting to be asked and she blinks at him, at Beau, for a moment and Fjord can practically see the gears in her head turning, trying to figure out if this is some sort of prank.

“ _Is_ there a tracker on board?” She finally asks.

“There might be,” Beau says. “We’re not sure.” Nott mulls this over some more.

“They _told you_ there was a tracker.”

“No,” Fjord says again. “But they said some things that _implied_ that they might be… keeping an eye on us.”

“Oh,” Nott says. “Ah.”

“So…?” Beau encourages her along.

“Well, it depends. Is it inside the ship or outside? Is it a device or a program? Do you know _any_ of that?”

“Assume it’s inside for now,” Fjord says.

“Good,” Nott says. “Because if it’s outside, someone else is going to have to go get it.” She plays restlessly with the hem of her jacket. “An hour? Maybe two?”

“They think we haven’t explored the _Johnsonii_ yet,” Fjord says. “So if we sit here for a little while, that’s what we’re doing. Take two.” He figures Nott will question why he lied to them (even _he_ couldn’t say why for sure) or say something about the fact that he even lied at all even though they had agreed to keep the discovery of the PUMAT to themselves but she doesn’t say a thing about it.

“What do I do if I find it?” Nott asks. Fjord and Beau exchange silent looks. They hadn’t discussed that part.

“Leave it,” Fjord says. “But I want to know everything about it. As much as you can figure out.”

“Alright,” Nott says. She turns to scurry away but Fjord stops her, calls her back and she glances at them over her shoulder.

“We’re keeping this between the three of us for now. Just until we know.”

She grunts as a response and then leaves. Fjord worries, just a bit, that she might tell Caleb anyway, since it seems as if they had that sort of relationship, but there wasn’t much he could do about that—he’d said that he trusted them to make the decisions with the well-being of the rest of the crew in mind on their own and that’s what he planned to uphold.

“Now what?” Beau asks.

“Now I’m going to go check on something. And then we sit down and figure out how we’re going to explore that trench.”

 

& & & &

 

There’s talking coming from the medical room as Fjord wanders past it towards the lab where he assumes that Caleb has holed himself up in once again and he considers walking right past it but he finds himself slowing, backtracking, coming to a stop just outside the open door. Jester is speaking with a whispered fervor, rambling about a mile a minute, and he waits for the volley from a second voice but there is none, as if she wasn’t giving them a chance to get a word in edgewise but—when he finally succumbs to his deepening curiosity and peers around the doorway—he finds that she’s completely alone.

She’s pacing the best she can in the small space, every other step a light skip and she uses her hand while she talks, fingers waving through the air as if spelling out each sentence with invisible letters. Fjord doesn’t duck out of the way in time and, during the third pass by that he’s watched, she turns her head and sees him there. Instead of yelling at him or appearing embarrassed at having been caught, she falls silent mid-sentence and grins.

“Were you spying on me, Fjord?”

“Not on purpose,” Fjord replies. “I was walking by and heard— Who were you talking to?” It’s possible Nott had slipped inside, was searching for the tracker in the walls and Jester had taken the opportunity to have a one-sided conversation with her but, from where he’s standing, it definitely appeared as if she was the sole person in the room.

“I was talking to the Traveler,” Jester says effortlessly. She lifts up the chain of a necklace Fjord had never noticed her wearing before and, dangling from it, is a square of dark blue, the digital symbol of a door with a road branching out from it quivering across the smooth surface. It disappears for a moment, a row of text replacing it but that, too, quickly vanishes and the symbol returns.

“And this Traveler fellow,” Fjord asks, “Where is he exactly?”

“Oh, he’s not a person. Not really. He’s way neater than that.” She seems to realize then that Fjord was still lingering in the doorway. “You can come in, you know. I promise I won’t do something horrible like take your temperature. Although I can tell from here that you’re very hot,” she says, overtly winking at him. Fjord definitely does not blush at that but, when he takes a single step over the threshold, he feels an anxiety wash over him like a cold sweat. There’s a pressure in the back of his head and he swears he hears the same beeping that he’d heard when he was in the suit, floating out in the ocean, but it must have been from one of the numerous screens lined on the walls inside. “You’re not scared of doctors are you, Fjord?” Jester asks. It must have been written all over his face.

“No. I, uh… Dejavu, I think,” Fjord says, lying through his teeth. “It’s just a weird feeling. Trips you up sometimes.”

“Oh yeah,” Jester says, but it’s difficult to tell if she falls for it. He’s never had issues with doctors or hospitals before but then he’d come back from the _Catterick_ and his opinions on them had done a near complete one-eighty. He didn’t know why and the one kind of person who could help him figure it out was the same kind that he now refused to visit. When he’d returned, the agent in charge of sorting through the incident had insisted that Fjord go to a hospital. _Just to get checked out_. Fjord had declined and they were in no position to force him. _That’s fine_ , the agent had said. _Trauma can manifest in different ways_.

( _Trauma_. Fjord hadn’t expected to hear that. He didn’t _feel_ particularly traumatized but maybe that was part of it. He’d said as much and the agent had stared at him for a moment, shifted paper-thin tablets on the table in the small room they were occupying.

 _You’re a lone survivor_ , she had said. _It’ll hit you eventually. I’d be worried if it didn’t_. She had let him go after that. They had held onto him for a long time, had kept him at the Border Station where he’d landed. They’d just wanted to make sure that he wasn’t a part of it, he was assured. Instead, he wound up looking like a coward. Or unbelievably lucky. It depended on who you asked.)

“This Traveler of yours,” Fjord says, “Isn’t a person.” Talk about something else. Take his mind off of things.

“He’s a program,” Jester says, smiling again, a crease forming between her eyebrows, mouth twitching down slightly when she notices that Fjord doesn’t seem to understand but then she brightens. “Okay. Well. I spent a lot of time by myself for a long time. My mother— She is beautiful and so great and she works _so hard_ but she needed to keep me hidden sometimes.” She waves a hand like _you know how it is_. “I had a computer but it was monitored and there really wasn’t any way for me to talk to anybody. But I used it anyway because there wasn’t much else for me to do.”

(Fjord was aware of other aliens smuggling their children in with them or having them arrive later, on their own and disguised. _We’re running out of room_ , he overheard one evening while sitting in the mess on board the _Pelican_. Someone had brought a tiny television with them and a few had crowded around, the volume cranked up. It was a joint speech between the Earth government and the one on Mars. _For an indefinite amount of time, we will no longer be accepting families._ They’d apologized but the rest was muffled by outrage and complaints.

Jester could have been in a situation like that but those five words— _we’re running out of room_ —had only been said two years ago and the way she talked about it already implied she has been on Earth for quite awhile, possibly longer than Fjord himself. He’d only know if he asked but really, it wasn’t his business.)

“So one evening, I’m playing this game called _Toll the Dead_. It’s really spooky. And the game starts glitching after a little while but I figured that was just part of it, you know? But _then_ a message pops up that says ‘hello, who have I found?’.”

“And it wasn’t part of the game.” His head still feels a little strange but if he focuses on Jester, on her story, he can mostly ignore it. Mostly.

“No!” She exclaims, obviously enjoying that she can tell someone about this. “The game doesn’t have any text! Just bells and weird sound effects. And it was _impossible_ for anyone to interact with me through there. My mother told me, she hired someone very, very smart to take all that off. To build walls and blocks. But here this was.”

“What’d you do?”

“I replied, of course. I said ‘hello, this is Jester!’. And then there was this long pause and I think, oh no, I messed up or maybe the computer sent them away but then I get a reply: ‘hello, Jester. I am the Traveler’.” She touches the necklace, taps the side of it with her index finger. “We talked the rest of the night. He found his way to me through the game.”

“Where’d he come from?” Just keep engaging. Keep talking.

“I don’t know. All he said to me was that he was made three years ago and that he escaped. He’s been bouncing around—mostly in games—since then. Looking for a friend.”

“And he found you.” Fjord says. Jester grins. “And you can give blessings. So he’s… a god?” A digital god. Fjord finds himself shocked that there haven’t been others before him.

“He could be. He is for me,” Jester tells him. “He should be for others.” She looks serious when she says it, but it’s not a dangerous sort of serious. “I can give blessings. They help to keep people hidden.” That made sense, considering that the program had spent it’s life—if that’s what you could call it—doing exactly that. “In return, I just have to do things to make him laugh.”

“To make a program… laugh.” It didn’t seem possible for something _created_ , something with no body and what too many people would debate on whether or not was a brain, to find anything _amusing_. But Jester sounded so sure. Not a big deal. Just a piece of advanced code that wanted to laugh. Did it want a following, too, or was that all Jester’s idea?

“Sure. I draw funny pictures,” (Jester, sitting on the floor of the cockpit, with a pad and a pen, humming to herself), “Or I play pranks on people sometimes.” (The driver of the cruiser who had brought them to the warehouse, rubbing something off the back window while Jester walked away laughing.) “And then I tell him about it. I found someone who could install him onto this little device.” She gestures to the necklace again. “I had to pay him a lot but I think it was worth it.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Fjord says after taking a moment to let everything she’s said sink in.

“He’d love to talk to you, you know. If you wanted. He’s really smart.”

“I’ll… I’ll pass. For now,” he adds, not making it a complete dismissal.

“What about you, Fjord? Do you have a patron? A deity?” Jester asks and Fjord is about to chuckle, say _that’s not something you just ask someone_ when his vision goes dark, the shape of something large and glowing flashes for half a second, so fast that he can’t figure out what it is and then he’s back in the room again, standing across from Jester, who’s waiting for an answer.

“I was actually on my way to find Caleb,” Fjord says, says it as if she had asked him what he was doing down here and Jester blinks, confused. “I’d like us all in the kitchen in about ten minutes. We should talk about what L&N told Beau and I.” Talk, at least, about their order and how they were going to work around it.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” He felt fine. The pressure was gone. Whatever device that had been beeping had stopped. It was just one of those weird things, he figures. He’d forgotten to eat lunch. He doesn’t really even remember what Jester had asked him. “I’ll leave you to finish your conversation.”

“Okay,” Jester says, sounds skeptical, but doesn’t fight him on it. He walks out, the sound of Jester restarting her chatter drifting behind him.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord finds Caleb back in his lab. He knocks even though the light beside the door is bright green and he watches as it turns to red, to green, to red and then, after nearly twenty seconds, green one more time. It slides open under Fjord’s touch and he walks in only a few steps; the lights inside have been dimmed except for one over the same table that Fjord had found him at earlier, where he was sitting now, leaning over what Fjord assumed was a microscope.

Caleb lifts his head, lets out a slow exhale through his nose.

“What can I do for you, Fjord?”

“I wanted…” He trails off. What _did_ he want? He had come to find him because there was something in him that told him it was necessary. That he _should_. “Coffee in ten minutes. In the kitchen,” he clarifies. Caleb stares at him, a clear but brief shift on his face: _Do I have to?_ “I’d like you to be there,” Fjord says.

“I’ll be there,” Caleb tells him, looking away.

“Do you mind if I stay in here until then?” Fjord finds himself asking and Caleb glances up again, misinterprets it as him not trusting that he’ll show.

“I’ll show.”

“I know,” Fjord says.

“Ah,” Caleb lets out on a breath. He gets it or he doesn’t and he’s just like Jester: he won’t bicker. Fjord sits down in the only other available seat and waits.

 

& & & &

 

“We’re definitely not doing that,” Molly says with a scoff once Fjord had explained how L&N expected them to proceed. They’ve all gathered exactly where Fjord had wanted them (all except for Nott and they all notice her absence, but Jester is the only one who asks where she is. _I have her looking for something_ , Fjord told her; it’s the truth, it’s just missing the specifics and he doesn’t miss how she looks to Beau for confirmation or how Caleb subtly presses his index finger behind his ear and talks so quietly his mouth barely moves), everyone around the table in the kitchen. Frumpkin even showed up, was currently curled in Molly’s lap, head down but every now and then casting a dirty look towards Fjord.

He doesn’t tell them that L&N probably _knows_ that they haven’t done as they asked. The worst, Fjord figures, that they could do was yell at him for it later. That’s what he hopes. There are weapons on board—weapons that were meant to take down a giant sea creature—but he doubted they would truly do something as drastic as blowing them sky high for not following orders and they definitely seemed to have no interest in coming down here themselves.

“We do what we did before,” Jester says, holds her hands as if she’s got an imaginary tablet and joystick in them, moves them around, “Whoosh. I drive the _Grimpo_ down there.”

“ _Grimpo_?” Beau snorts.

“I named the drone,” Jester says. “I asked Caleb if there were any small and cute animals down here and he told me there was something called a Grimp— Grimp-something-or-other.”

“ _Grimpoteuthis_ ,” Caleb says, helping her, and then simplifies it for the others: “Dumbo octopus.”

“It looks really stupid. But so does the drone,” Jester laughs.

“Not that I’m on their side,” Yasha says, tugging them back on track, “But what’s the harm? Taking the entire ship down, I mean.”

“It’s unmapped,” Fjord says. “We have no idea how big it is. How far down it goes. The _Bathynomus_ — It’s not that small. Compared to a cargo ship, sure. It’s a peanut. But if we take this whole ship into that trench… We could wind up living there.”

“Fjord is correct,” Caleb adds. “Trenches are typically fairly steep. Narrow.” He takes his two hands, faces his fingers downward and then touches his fingertips together, forming a v-shape. “It would be highly unlikely that this vessel would be able to go very far, if anywhere into it at all. Truthfully, I find their suggestion quite ludicrous. These— These people are supposed to be experts? Oceanographers, no? They should know the basic structure of a deep-sea trench.” He scoffs, wraps his hands around his mug again and stares into it, as if the liquid inside had an answer for him.

“So that’s settled,” Fjord says. “Unless, Yasha…?”

“I will go with the group,” she says softly from where she’s standing by the coffee machine, leaning against the counter.

“We send the dro—” Fjord starts, catches a glimpse of Jester, who tilts her head slightly towards him, eyes widening just a bit. _The what?_ “We send _Grimpo_ down into the trench. See what we can see. I’ll deal with L &N if they come calling.”

“Why would they?” Molly asks and Fjord inwardly cringes. He hadn’t meant to say that but now it was out there.

“They might ask for data,” Fjord says. “If I send it, they’ll likely know that it’s not from the _Bathynomus_.” Molly stares him down, eyes narrowing, chin lifting, but then he leans back and drops his head, conceding. _Fine_ , the gesture seems to say, _I’ll let you tell me that for now._ Fjord wasn’t an expert at reading people but Molly wasn’t trying exceptionally hard to hide what the thought that particular time. He wants Fjord to know that _he knows_ he he was keeping something from them. “As soon as I hear back from Nott, we should go. I don’t have the location locked in my head but I can’t imagine it’ll be a long jaunt.”

He expects them all to get up, go their own separate ways until Fjord gathered them all up once more but nobody moves.

“I’m very interested in what Nott is looking for,” Molly says. “I would very much like to be here when she’s finished.”

“I admit,” Caleb says as well, “I am quite curious myself.”

“You do know I could just leave and go wait for her somewhere else, right?” Fjord asks.

“I have nothing better to do until then,” Molly says. “Where were you thinking of going?” He smiles cheekily at Fjord, who feels himself frowning in return.

“I suppose nowhere.”

“Great,” Molly says. “Caleb’s staying. Jester?”

“Oh yes,” she says. Yasha, too, agrees to stay with an upward twitch of her shoulder.

“Beauregard?” Molly looks to Beau, who scowls more so than she typically did. “I assume you already know. So you’ll stay.” He claps his hand, rubs them together. _Shuff shuff._ “Quality time with the crew. I could use a top-up. Anyone else?” He holds out his mug towards Yasha, who was closest to the carafe and she picks it up, awkwardly begins pouring the coffee into everyone’s cups whether they wanted more or not.

 

& & & &

 

They’re three-cups-a-piece deep into the last few minutes of the second hour that Fjord had given Nott to find the tracker and not a single one of them has left the kitchen. Jester had lead most of the conversation, pulling responses out of anyone who would give one to her. The cards Fjord had seen her using when teaching Nott how to play had been stored in a cabinet next to the pre-packaged meals for the lazy and Jester takes them out but can’t convince anyone to join her, pouts her way through a single-player game that didn’t seem to have an end.

Laid out in front of her, taking over the entire table in columns and rows, colors and numbers in an unspecified order, Jester leans over them, taps a finger to her mouth as she thinks, interrupted when Frumpkin leaps up and walks over the cards, sending a few of them skittering towards the floor. She complains but it’s only half-hearted, chastises the animal without much seriousness to her words and Frumpkin doesn’t pay her attention in return, starts batting at the cards still left behind.

“Ah,” comes, disconcerted, from the doorway. “Everyone’s here.” Nott shrinks back a short step when all eyes are on her at relatively the same time.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Fjord asks. She glances at the others, at Fjord.

“Yes,” Nott says, keeps her focus on Fjord, staring him down. There’s a way in which she says it, that single word (through sharply clenched teeth, drawn out, the ‘S’ extending into a hiss), as if she’s attempting to communicate that she was answering the same question but talking about something completely different, hoping that Fjord would _know_ without her having to say so.

“Well,” Molly says, “Don’t keep us all in suspense.”

“L&N are tracking us,” Beau says. “The first thing they asked when we connected to their little channel was if everything was ‘alright’.”

“Maybe they were just being nice,” Jester offers.

“Out of nowhere? In the middle of the day. Besides, these guys don’t exactly seem like the ‘just being nice’ types,” Beau counters.

“Beau and I had a weird feeling about it once we finished the conversation,” Fjord explains, “So we asked Nott to look into it. I didn’t want to trouble anyone until we were sure.”

“But now we’re sure,” Caleb says.

“We’re sure,” Nott affirms. “It’s a program, hidden inside a directory stuffed with data that nobody ever bothers to look at. They can tell when we’re moving and when we’re not.” She reaches into a pocket, her fingers moving as she touches something. The room is quiet enough that they can hear the _skrittch skrittch skrittch_ of her thumbnail rubbing back and forth against it. “And they know exactly where we are.”

“They do?” Fjord asks. Then what was the point in contacting them? If they had an exact location of the _Bathynomus_ , then they were aware that they had reached the _Johnsonii_ , that they were very likely exploring the wreckage.

Was it a test after all? Insinuate that they know they’ve stopped moving but not where they are and see if they’re honest? _Suggest_ that they were tracking them and watch to see how they react now that they had this knowledge as opposed to them having known it from the start. Would they panic? Let’s give them an order that would be ridiculous to follow and see if they actually do it. What will their excuse be if they don’t?

 _Are we secretly some sort of experiment?_ Fjord wonders. Or were they just toying with them for some unknown reason? But thinking like that—same as how he started back in the cockpit right after they’d hung up—could send him spiralling and that wasn’t helpful to _anyone_ —including himself.

Fjord takes in a deep breath. They’d been talking amongst themselves while he’d been thinking and he hadn’t retained a word of it.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable,” he says, same as he’d mentioned to Beau, and hopes at least _one_ of them was listening. “This ship _does_ belong to them. This is their mission as much as it is ours. Maybe more so theirs.” They’re quieting down, realizing that he’s started speaking again. “It’s the fact that they kept it from us that’s vexing me. L &N neglecting to tell us certain things seems to be a swiftly recurring theme here.”

“Well then,” Nott says from where she hasn’t moved, her gaze pointedly fixed on Fjord again or, maybe, had never left him, “You and them have something in common.” With nobody else talking, Fjord couldn’t imagine how the room could possibly get quieter and yet, somehow, it almost seemed as if the ship itself dulled the hum of it’s engines. “The keeping secrets thing, I mean.” He thinks, maybe, that she’s still frustrated that he and Beau had asked her to not tell the others what she was doing for two hours but she’s not directing this accusatory inflection at the both of them; it’s _just_ him. And then she asks: “Why are there two missiles hidden in the bottom of the ship?”

Of course. She had to look _everywhere_ for that tracking device—which hadn’t turned out to be a device at all. He had _asked_ her to. He feels stupid for not foreseeing this but, somehow, equally surprised that it had taken this long. He’s unsure, though, why Nott had specifically targeted _him_ for this, for being the only one who had knowledge despite the fact that Beau—the _engineer_ —should have been aware of their presence, considering it could be assumed that she had been down with the engines, with the drone, and would have seen two hulking— currently deactivated—explosive weapons just a few feet away.

Maybe this was good. Maybe they were all better off believing that only _he_ possessed that particular information and not that two others were in on it as well. The last thing they needed was the group turning against each other. Telling L &N that the crew were at each other’s throats after only three days might get them all out of this mission ahead of schedule which might be a welcome relief for some or they could have them stay put, too curious to watch it unfold for the sake of research. But if he got Beau and Yasha to play along, to act as if they, too, were kept in the dark… Six against one he could handle. Having them all hate him but not each other still meant they could get things done—his opinion on matters wouldn’t count for nearly as much anymore but he’d never wanted to be in charge anyway.

“They’re there,” Fjord says, “Because L&N… We’ve been told to kill the creature once we find it. I was the only one who knew,” he continues, gives each of them a moment of eye contact but holds it a second or two longer on Beau and Yasha, silently telling them _just go with this_. “They told me not to inform the rest of you. Said that some of you might not have agreed to provide your expertise to the mission if you knew this was the endgame.”

“Did they say _which_ one of us they thought would object?” Molly asks.

“They did not.” Even now, after getting to know them a little bit more than he did when they had all sat awkwardly together in the nearly empty hangar, he was unclear on who outside of himself, Beau, and Yasha that would have rained down righteous terror on finding out that this creature had an invisible death sentence riding on it’s back. “I assumed it would be you,” Fjord indicates towards Caleb. He’d been his best guess. The scientist.

“While I assure you that I _am_ perturbed to hear that the first thing they want to do upon discovering a new lifeform is obliterate it, I can also say that I am not alarmed in the slightest,” Caleb says. “And it would not have stopped me from coming,” he adds. “I do not enjoy— It was better for Nott and I to be here.”

“Better?” Jester frowns. “Why?”

“I don’t believe that’s really the most important thing happening right at the moment,” Caleb replies.

“Yeah. I mean… Hey, man,” Beau says, “Whatever the reason, I can’t believe you would fuckin’ keep something like that from all of us.” It’s a terrible performance; they would have been better off if she’d just said nothing at all and pretended to quietly seethe from where she’s sitting cross-legged on her seat beside Jester. Fjord raises an eyebrow at her and she gives him the barest hint of a shrug.

Yasha looks slightly bewildered, her middle finger distractedly picking at the skin around the thumb on the same hand before bringing the arm up so she could cross both over her chest.

“But you—” She starts but Fjord talks over her, acts as if he’s predicted what she was going to say instead of stopping her from implicating herself.

“I know.” That has her furrowing her brows and she opens her mouth to say something else but is saved by the ship suddenly filling the room with the wail of an alarm.

“What does that mean?” Jester asks, looking up to the low ceiling, towards the source of the sound.

“Not a clue,” Fjord says. He knew the alert for when the ship was lost, veering off course, but they weren’t currently moving and he knew the trill of an incoming message which this definitely was not. This one he hadn’t had the privilege of hearing yet but, a noise like this—low, uneven, each one pulled out at the end ( _wheeum wheeum wheeum_ )—couldn’t be good. He stands without another word, hears Molly say:

“To be continued.” Fjord glances back at him. He nods. _This is not the end of this discussion._

He leaves the kitchen but he does not leave it alone.

 

& & & &

 

There isn’t enough room in the cockpit for all seven of them, but it doesn’t stop them from trying.

Fjord doesn’t have to search for the window that’s elucidating on the reason for the ship’s current tantrum because it’s front and center, overlapping all the others: _FOREIGN BODY DETECTED._ It flashes at them in red. The alarm is much louder in here and Jester asks, hands over her ears, if Fjord can _make it stop_. He figures that out, silences the screaming but the words are still there, not giving them anything else to work with.

“It’s not in here is it?” Fjord hears Nott ask from somewhere to the left of where’s he’s sitting. Molly and Jester had managed to take the lead, worm their way directly up behind his seat, the others crammed in back somewhere.

“I don’t think so.” He taps and swipes, moves things around, punches in search terms because he was still learning some of this as he went. Finally, he manages to pull up a screen with more information but it doesn’t tell him much. “It’s outside. Within… forty feet of the ship.” The windows are still unshielded, the lights still on, and Fjord brightens them just a few notches, stares out, leaning forward over the console a bit but all he sees is what he expects: water, sand, the wreck, and the occasional floating _thing_ that seemed fairly standard for where they were. If _that_ was what set off the warning bells, the alarm would have been going off every millisecond.

“Could it have been a fish?” Jester inquires.

“The alert would have gone off earlier if that’s what it was,” Fjord says. There might not be nearly as many of them down here as there were much further above them, but Fjord would like to think that a vessel that was going to be moving along in water would be programmed to understand what a fish might look like on its sensors.

He brings up the radar, cleans off the squiggles of terrain, leaves just curved green lines and three little dots: the _Bathynomus_ , the _Johnsonii_ and then there, just outside of the lights, exactly forty-four feet away, was the anomaly. It wasn’t moving. Fjord thinks back to Yasha, her weapon pointed out towards the black.

_I thought…_

That had only been a little over three hours ago. Something _had_ been out there and it had gotten closer. Fjord turns his chair enough that he could look behind him and he finds Yasha crowding the doorway, makes the briefest of eye contact with her before she averts her gaze back out the window but Fjord thinks he can see her softly shake her head. He’s not sure what it means.

“Uh… Fjord?” Jester gets his attention. “It’s gone.” He spins back around towards the console and she’s right. The ships are the only two dots on the radar now. The space where the third had been is empty.

“Did you see where it went?” Fjord asks.

“It didn’t _go_ ,” Jester says. “It just disappeared.” The words telling them it had been detected disappear, too, which meant that it had vanished out of range. Or that it was nothing at all. Fjord knows that’s just wishful thinking on his part, that all of this was just some malfunction, a species of animal the ship didn’t understand or a free-floating plant that was just passing by.

“Huh,” Beau says from where she’s standing by the console, right near the crease where the window met the metal wall. “I guess it wasn’t—” The alarm cuts her off, starts blaring again and they all react to it, covering the sides of their heads with their hands and arms, hunkering down as if they could physically _feel_ the noise. Hunching in his seat, Fjord turns it off for a second time, the message _FOREIGN BODY DETECTED_ making its return on the screen.

“It says it’s right—”

“—There,” Nott finishes for him but she’s not looking at the same screen that Fjord had been staring at. She’s looking directly out the window. Synchronously, they follow her gaze but none of them have to ask for her to point out what she’s seeing; standing beside the hole in the _Johnsonii_ ’s side is… Fjord has no idea what to call it and staring at it sends a tingle of a feeling he could only describe as _not good_ down the back of his neck and across his shoulders.

It doesn’t seem particularly tall—or, at least, not from where they’re currently sitting. It’s the same sort of pale, pinkish white that the creature had been, the kind of color on something that hasn’t seen any sunlight and it lists slightly to the right but not due to an uneven terrain.

“One of its legs is longer than the other,” Beau says.

“That’s because they’re two different legs,” Jester points out. And she’s right, although they’re just far enough away that it’s difficult to tell exactly what they are but Fjord is getting a churning in his stomach, a whisper in the back of his head that he _knows_ whose legs those belonged to. It was easier fixate on the lower half, to comment on it, because the rest of it was _too much_ to take in. The legs are attached to an amorphous mass of what Fjord found himself hoping to _something_ wasn’t what it looked like. It seemed as if it should weigh a remarkable amount, based solely on how much of it there was, supported only by two lopsided limbs, but it held itself up as if it was nothing at all. Three arms of various kinds stuck out in all the wrong places. Fjord was struck with the unbearable urge to close the shielding over the windows. It was impossible for it to see them and there was no discernible face anywhere on it, yet it still felt like it was watching them.

Fjord hears Caleb cursing but his translator doesn’t pick it up right away, he’s muttering it too fast.

“What is it?” Jester whispers. “What is that?”

“I don’t know.” The tone for an incoming communication startles them all and, for a second, Fjord thinks that the monstrosity outside was trying to contact them but he lets out a breath when he sees that it’s L&N for the second time that day.

“ _Bathynomus_ ,” comes the same voice as earlier. “We’ve noticed that you’re still in the same location. We really would like you to get to the point-of-origin as soon as you can. The priority on that is higher at the moment. The information and camera feed from the drone will be sufficient.” She makes no mention of wanting to go over what they saw. Nothing about the missing people. Fjord files that away for dissection later.

“We’re having a bit of an engine problem at the moment,” Fjord says, not tearing his gaze away from the knees of the fiend outside in the water. “We’ll be staying here until Beau can make repairs.” He had no direct plans on leaving the area until they figured out what the heck that _thing_ was and he knows that was a choice the others should be included in but, for now, all he’s thinking about is an excuse to buy them some time.

“What kind of engine trouble?” The voice asks.

“I would have to ask Beau. That’s not exactly my area of expertise. She said she noticed an issue and that we shouldn’t leave until its been addressed.” There’s a silence from the other end of the connection and Fjord wonders if they were checking in on them, if they had access to their engines and their computers too and were searching for this apparent _issue_ that he had just mentioned. Either that or she didn’t believe a word of what he’d just said and was trying to decide what to do about it, hoping the quiet will spurn him into telling the truth. He wishes there was a way to covertly ask Beau if there was something that could be damaged that would hinder their progress but might not be picked up by the internal computers but he knows muting L &N would be too suspicious and he _definitely_ knows that they would hear him talking to her. He’s about to tell them that he doesn’t have time to talk in the most professional way he could manage when the voice speaks again.

“Alright. Keep us apprised of your situation. We’d like a full report on the issue once it’s fixed so we know what to look out for in the future. How is Beauregard doing, by the way?” She thinks he’s alone. She doesn’t know the entire rest of the crew is behind him. Fjord can _feel_ everyone’s eyes on the back of his head but he doesn’t regard any of them.

“She’s great,” he says and hopes that it sounds genuine because it _is_ and that Beau doesn’t think he’s just saying that because she’s standing there. “I’m sorry but I really need to go. I was in the middle of running diagnostics to make sure nothing else was wrong.” They might be able to find out that he wasn’t but he couldn’t come up with anything better. “And I should really check on the progress in the belly.” That _thing_ is still there, unmoving, as if transfixed by the lights. Another pause.

“Fine.” The voice doesn’t sound pleased but, then again, she hasn’t since the first time Fjord had spoken to her. She disconnects from the line without saying goodbye and Fjord lets out a slow exhale as he sits back in his chair.

“You talking about us to those people?” Beau asks. Accusatory. She’s glowering at him, defined arms pulled over her chest. He was sure he told them that already, but it’s possible he forgot to specify that particular part what they’d requested from him during updates.

“They want me to,” Fjord says. The man with the glasses had said that they weren’t looking for him to spill all of the crew’s secrets but the way that the question was phrased at the end of each check-in so far and how she had specifically asked about Beau made it seem like they were expecting more without making it clear that was what they wanted. _He told us everything. But we never asked him to_. He didn’t give them anything particularly useful and he mulled over if they thought he wasn’t being honest out of loyalty when he said they were getting along fine. He’d like to tell Beau—tell the rest of them—this but, like so many other discussions today, it was wrong place, wrong time. He hopes that his answer right now is enough to convince her.

“What do you think it wants?” Jester queries, brings their attention fully back to the horror, unmoving, beyond the window.

“I don’t know,” Molly says. “Anybody interested in going to ask it?” Nobody responds. “I _did_ say that I was up for getting in on whatever was next.”

“Nobody is going out there,” Fjord says hastily, doesn’t give any of them time to start brainstorming on who else would go, what they would do. “We send the dro— We send Jester’s _Grimpo_ out there.”

“ _Grimpo_!” Jester cheers.

“We send it out,” Fjord says. “We let it have a look. Same as we did before. But I don’t want anyone leaving this ship until we figure out what the hell that thing is.” He prepares for push-back, for a comment about how they thought he wasn’t in charge and he’ll tell them _I know what I said and I still mean it but this is the one thing that isn’t up for debate_. He prepares for it but not a single soul standing behind him objects.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord decides to stay where he is, holed up in the cockpit, watching the thing from the window. It’s the only place that they can see it before Jester sends out the _Grimpo_ and he doesn’t want them all to walk away and look again through a camera to find that it’s gone. Maybe Fjord was uncomfortable knowing that it would be out there and nobody would be staring it down. It’s a weird, unsettling feeling to be aware of the fact that _something_ is out there and aware of you but you don’t have a focus on it.

He doesn’t need to be there with them while Jester navigates the drone. He’s fairly certain that he can stream the camera to his console, too, and they can talk through the internal ship communication. He could practically live in here if he wanted to, as long as he stored rations away somewhere. He supposes he’d have to use the bathroom at some point but there’s one on this floor, just outside the room. He wouldn’t have to go very far at all. _Nobody would ever see me again_ , he thinks. _I could stay here forever_. He’s not sure why he’s thinking about it. He certainly has no reason to.

He sends them all to the rec room. (He _suggests_ that they go. Not an order. Never an _order_.) Yasha awkwardly offers to stay but he declines and she tilts her chin down in a wordless acquiescence. Before Beau follows the rest, Fjord says that it might be helpful to all of them if she tried to figure out what could be broken in the engine that would leave them stalled until it was squared away.

(“And I guess you’ll need to pretend to fix it so I have something to tell them later,” he had said to her.

“I could always just actually break something,” Beau had said back, “And then fix it.” Fjord had thought that over for a moment.

“As long as you can make the repairs…” leaves the _go for it_ left unsaid. Beau had looked surprised, as if she had been joking and hadn’t expected him to take her seriously. Her frown deepened, as she tried to figure out if he was just pulling her leg in return. He was not, but he didn’t tell her that.)

And then he’s alone.

He’s left the communication channel open, listens to the ambient sounds of the ship outside the room, the overlapping chatter from the rest of the crew, and he flips through windows on the console, not looking for anything in particular but just giving himself something to do while he waited. His gaze keeps flicking up to glimpse out into the ocean, towards the _Johnsonii_ , and that monstrosity is still there, still standing. Fjord would think that it might not even be alive, except he’s fairly certain he sees some of the fingers on one of the hands twitch, although it could just be a trick of the light and water. Staring at it for longer than a few seconds leaves him disquieted and he’s not sure if it’s _doing_ that or if it’s solely because of how ghastly its appearance is; either way, he finds himself with an index finger hovering over the switch to lower the safeguards when he hears someone walking towards him.

“Really, you don’t have to—” He assumes it’s Yasha returning anyway but instead finds himself face-to-face with Molly.

“Don’t have to what?” Molly asks, but not in a way where he’s really expecting an answer. Fjord gives him one anyway.

“Nevermind. Thought you were someone else.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” he replies. He walks the rest of the way in, comes up beside Fjord’s seat as he’s turning back around to face forward.

“What do you make of that?” Fjord points at the window without looking.

“Don’t know.” Molly pauses. “I have some thoughts but. Well. Who knows if any of them are right.”

“What are they?”

“Were you ever going to tell us about what else was going on here?” Molly inquires instead, not answering Fjord’s question. Fjord’s hands freeze for a moment and he glances up at Molly, who’s not looking back at him, his red eyes gazing out at the display in front of them. There’s a lull from everywhere else, the chitchat brought down to a murmur and Fjord had forgotten that they could all hear what’s happening in here, too. It’s unclear whether Molly was aware of that, his expression indifferent, as if he’d just asked what was for dinner or how his morning had been.

Fjord considers muting the channel, having this just be between them but he changes his mind.

“To be perfectly honest,” he says, “It had—” He stops himself. He was going to mislead them but he doesn’t know why. He had no reason to. It was just going to _happen_. Strange. “I had planned to. When it was right.”

“Hm.” Molly hums, doesn’t press on _when_ Fjord thought was ‘right’, which was good, considering that he had no idea. When they had found it, maybe. _If_ they found it. Right before they had to pull the trigger. _By the way, we’re supposed to kill this thing. Thoughts? You have two seconds._ None of the others say a thing. They either didn’t care, heard what they wanted, or were waiting for more. Finally, they hear Jester say:

“ _Grimpo_ is go go go!” Fjord thinks that means the drone is _ready_ but then there’s a flashing yellow light on the center console, letting him know there was a camera feed available. He opens it and it fills up the entire console, overlaying the other windows on the screen and he and Molly watch as the creature slowly, very slowly, gets nearer.

He peers up and out at the drone as Jester maneuvered it.

“Jester…” He starts to say, warn her not to get too into spitting distance.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jester grumbles, her voice filling the room. She stops, hovering.

It’s even worse up close.

“The arms are all different, too,” he hears someone say. They’re right. One of them is long and slender, the other short and muscular. The third had scales. So did the right leg—the longer one—the other much more human.

Even under water it manages to somehow look _wet_ , an amalgamation of pale flesh and something organic, something the ship hadn’t been able to identify. There are lumps under the surface like poorly molded clay, and it seems like the thin skin was pulled taut over them, but it’s not easy to tell what’s underneath. Fjord’s not sure he _wants_ to know, but he doesn’t have a choice; directly beside the scaley arm, beneath the filmy membrane, he sees a wide, fearful eye blink. He doesn’t know if the others see it. He can’t make himself ask. The words are there but they’re caught in a loop inside his own head. _Did you see that? Did you see that? Did you see—_

“Holy shit,” he hears Beau say, clear as day in the otherwise deathly silence. The drone, very subtly, starts moving closer.

“Jester,” Fjord says again.

“It’s okay,” she says, “I just want to get a little— Whoops.” The small light on the front of small ship ignites, a spotlight splashing completely over the mutated figure and the last thing Fjord gets a clear image of before it attacks is a patch emblazoned with the L&N logo absorbed onto one of the arms.

After that, it’s a mess of limbs, protuberant matter and metal fighting each other. Fjord and Molly watch the wrestling match through the window, listen as Jester struggles, grunting and huffing as she tries to get the drone away but the figure is too heavy, it’s too fast and it won’t let go. It must hit something important because the light goes out and the drone goes completely dead. The monster stops, goes still, falls off the machine back into the sand.

“ _Grimpo_ …” Jester says breathlessly, sadly. Another voice says something else but it’s indistinct.

“What?” Fjord asks. The same voice but, once again, it’s too muddled. “I can’t—”

“Turn off the lights!” Beau and Nott yell simultaneously. He doesn’t ask for an explanation, despite desperately wanting one, and does as they say, swiping the black screen of the drone’s camera away, bringing up the panel for the lights. They slam off and the pitch consumes them. Fjord can see basic outlines, shapes in the nothingness. The figure stays for a few seconds longer before bounding quickly backwards into the darkness.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Beau says after a minute of tense stillness. Fjord could not have said it better himself.

 

& & & &

 

“—Try that right there? Hold that down?” Beau is asking Jester, the two of them perched on the back of the couch.

“I told you, I cannot do anything! It doesn’t respond! _Grimpo_ is dead, Beau, and I—” They’re in the middle of an argument, one that sounds as if it had been going for a short while already, but it comes to a halt once Fjord and Molly enter the room. For a moment, like many times before, nobody says anything, all of them searching each other’s faces, waiting for _someone_ to offer a decent explanation or, maybe, to tell them that this was all a joke.

“The lights,” Fjord says. “What was the deal with turning off the lights?” Start small. Start with the smallest thing that was bugging him and then move on to confirming the horrible truth that wanted to claw its way out from the back of his head.

“Some deep sea creatures have been known to react unusually aggressively when presented with man-made light,” Caleb says weakly from where he’s standing in the back of the room, near the bank of library computers, as far away from the screen the camera feed must have been displayed on as he could get without leaving. “This— This _thing_ is— I don’t know what— I made an assumption.” He’s said all of this to the wall opposite him but now he turns his head, looks nervously to Fjord for a second or two. “Did it work?”

“Seemed to,” Fjord says. _How_ far it had gone was another question entirely but it was far enough that the ship neither saw it as a threat or saw it at all and, for now, that was good enough.

“What— What _was_ that?” Nott demands. “It’s limbs were all different. But the only people down here were—” She cuts herself off, realization settling over her face.

“What?” Jester insists because she _doesn’t get it_ , not yet. “What is it?”

“Does anyone have a manifest for the _Johnsonii_ on hand?” Fjord asks the room and hopes that’s enough for her to connect the dots; it is, but he watches as the others’ arms move, searching for a useable tablet in the room until Caleb speaks, his voice unsteady still.

“I remember. I remember what was on it.” He swallows. “Two humans. Male and female. A Half-elf female. A Dwarven female.” A heavy inhale, exhale through his nose. “And a Dragonborn male.” He glances to Fjord again. “I could give you their names, if you’d like.” Fjord shakes his head. Maybe, eventually, he’d like to know but right now it wasn’t going to help because the names might trigger a recollection of faces and he doesn’t need those in his head. He doesn’t want to find himself knowing which eye it had been that blinked at them.

“How the fuck does something like that happen?” Beau asks. “Do you think the creature did that?” She’s directing her questions to Caleb because that’s why he’s here, he’s their scientist, but Caleb shakes his head, slow, back and forth once, twice, three times.

“I’ve never— I would have to study it. The creature. That… thing. I cannot just _know_ by looking at it.” He glances around, settles his eyes on Beau. She’s not content with his answer. “The bodies of the crew… A spider will build a sac of its webbing around its dinner. It keeps them alive, for a time.”

“You think that’s what that is,” Beau says.

“I don’t—” He’s getting frustrated. “I _can_ say, for sure, that a brain must still be intact, somewhere in there. It’s the only way it can walk. That it can have any sort of awareness. But that’s— I can only tell you what I saw. I can only extrapolate. And, even then, it’s supposition. I would have to scan it.” He goes back to studying the wall. He’s thinking or he’s shutting himself off; either way, he’s signaled that he’s done—for the time being, at least.

“What about the _Grimpo_?” Jester inquires. “We can’t just leave it out there.”

“I kinda think that’s the least of our problems right now,” Beau tells her off-handedly.

“But what it recorded… If we leave it out there, we will never have it. And it’s the only one we have. What if Beau can fix it? What if there is something helpful for Caleb on it?” Jester implores.

“So someone will have to go out there,” Nott asks, “And get it?” She gets soundlessness as her answer. “Not it.” She all but puts a slender finger to her nose when she says it.

“I will do it,” Jester says and the words have just barely left her mouth when Fjord follows swiftly with: “No. Absolutely not.”

“Well then,” Molly comments, “I would love to be in the room with you while you try to explain how the drone broke and why you refuse to go get it. And, if you’re going to be honest, how you plan to do so without any proof. I was _there_ and I find this whole thing unbelievable.”

Jester hops off the back of the couch, lands easily on her feet. “I can do it.” Fjord scratches at his jaw. Just because they couldn’t see it anymore doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there and if it had _any_ sort of connection to the massive animal that they were sent down here to find, then there was a chance that that, too, was somewhere nearby. What if it had sent that _thing_ out to scout ahead?

What if that thing was the creature’s drone?

“I’m very strong,” Jester says. “I can push it back to the ship. Right up into its little hidey-hole.” She smiles lightly at Fjord’s frown. “It will take two minutes. Four,” she corrects. “There and back.”

“If Caleb’s right about the light… We won’t be able to turn the ship’s lights on for you. You couldn’t even have the light in your helmet on,” Fjord says. “No. I’ll do it. I can see—”

“—In the dark?” Jester completes it for him. “So can I! I mean, not perfectly. But better than a human can. No offense,” she waves a hand towards Beau and then Caleb.

“None taken,” Beau says. “You know, I found a pair of goggles in here that could help. It lets you, you know. Do what you guys do. I could do it.”

“I could also,” Yasha says. “And I could bring my gun.”

“I will do it!” Jester raises her voice, all but yells at them, and they stop talking. “I want to help. Besides, I drove it. I named it. The _Grimpo_ is practically mine.” Fjord stares at her.

“Four minutes.”

“Four minutes,” she repeats.

“Alright. You’ll do it.” Fjord sighs. “I’ll come down with you.” Jester’s smile widens and she wiggles her shoulders slightly. “Jester.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says again, just as she had when he’d said her name, warning her against getting too close to the horror outside.

“Beau…” He starts to say but he doesn’t need to finish.

“I’ll go wait by where the drone is stored,” she says. “Make sure the door’s open. And I’ll be able to check on it as soon as it gets here. Nott,” she turns towards the goblin. “Come on.”

“What? Me? Why?”

“It might not be mechanical. I don’t know shit about computers. You might need to look at it.”

“Fine,” Nott says, but doesn’t sound too pleased about it.

“Yasha,” Fjord says, turns to where she’s standing, where she’d been quiet the entire conversation. “You don’t have to, of course, but I’d like you in the cockpit. You’ll be able to keep an eye on Jester up there. And someone should be up there to talk to L&N if they call in.” The first part of his request has her unphased, but it’s the second half of it that has her expression shift into a mild panic.

“Me? Talk to— Oh. No. I mean, I’m not exactly— I can’t—” _I can’t talk to people_ , she seems like she’s trying to say. _I can’t lie as good as you_.

“I’ll go with her,” Caleb says.

“That leaves me then, does it?” Molly asks. “Might as well follow you, Fjord. Since we’re all pairing off.” They all start moving at once and Beau catches Yasha by the arm before she walks out, Caleb in tow.

“Here,” Fjord hears her say, watches her hand Yasha a small tablet she pulls from her back pocket. “If they ask about the engine, just tell ‘em this.” Yasha takes it, studies the words and then passes it to Caleb.

“And what do I say,” Caleb asks Fjord instead of Beau, “If they ask why they are speaking to me and not you?”

“You’ll think of something,” Fjord says. “Just don’t tell them I’m dead and I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Once they’re outside the room, waiting their turns for the ladder, Molly says to Fjord and Jester that he’ll _meet them down there_ , that he needs to _get something first_. And then slowly, finally, they all go their separate ways.

 

& & & &

 

“It’s too bad I already used my blessing today, eh?” Jester says. She’s putting on her suit, pulling the sleeves up over her shoulders. “But hmm. Here.” Before she seals the suit closed, before Fjord could do it for her, she grips a gloved hand around her necklace, holds the other one out until Fjord realizes that she wants him to take it. He does so, warily. “Traveler. I know I do not get another blessing until tomorrow and I have been slacking off on my duties to you since I got here, but it would be really nice if you could keep an eye on me while I am alone out there.” When she concludes, she pauses as if she’s waiting for some sort of confirmation, and then lets out a breath, a nod, and drops her hand from her neck, lets go of Fjord.

He wants to ask how she thinks a program around her neck will be able to help but he doesn’t. He turns when Molly walks in holding two cases, one familiar, one not.

“What’s this?” Fjord asks when Molly stops, puts them down on either side of himself.

“My guns,” he says. “And yours.”

“I don’t need those,” Jester asserts as she continues getting dressed.

“They aren’t for you,” Molly says, going over to the other side of the room to the panel he had used before, wakes it up and Fjord watches his fingers, listens as the transparent tube comes lowering down from where it was folded into the ceiling. “They’re for us.” _Just in case_. The sphere holding Caleb’s Dancing Lights is still on the floor and Fjord casually takes mental note of them. Useful, maybe.

“Okay!” Jester says, helmet under her arm and she holds it out to Fjord. She _could_ put it on herself, but she wants him to do it and he obliges, copies Molly’s movements from earlier when he had checked their suits before they left. She says something else but nothing comes through. He taps his ear, sees her say _oh!_ “There we go.” Her mouth is moving, but her voice is coming from somewhere above him. It’s disconcerting and he wonders if that was how it felt for the others. She gives him a thumbs up, which he returns.

“You keep the line open the entire time,” Fjord tells her.

“Yes, sir,” Jester awkwardly salutes.

“Door’s open,” Beau’s voice comes in over the speakers, “All Jester has to do is shove it in.”

“I can shove, don’t you worry,” Jester replies and then looks to Fjord again, who lifts his hand and curls his fingers into a tight fist, holds the flats of his knuckles towards her. “What’re you doing?” She asks. He moves the hand closer.

“It’s a human thing,” Fjord says. “You do it, too.” She excitedly copies him, holds up her fist, and he bumps hers against his own. “Like that. And sometimes…” He bumps it once more except, this time, when he pulls away, he opens his hand, fingers spreading, and makes an explosion noise.

“Okay,” Jester says. “Here.” She understands it now, sort of, and they do it a third time. When they pull back, Fjord opens his hand and says “Boom.”

“Boom!” Jester echoes. She hesitates a moment, her smile just barely faltering, but then she says “Okey-dokey!” and marches over to the tube. Sliding in, the door shuts securely and she swivels her neck to look at Fjord and Molly. Like last time, six seconds pass and then, just as the hatch opens and a millisecond before she drops, Jester waves. “ _Whoa_ ,” they hear shortly after. “This is _weird_.”

“You know what to do if you get lost in the woods, right?” Molly asks.

“Ask a bear for directions?” Jester says, the uptalk at the end making it sound like a question.

“Good girl,” Molly replies. Fjord flashes him a look and Molly curves up one side of his lips in a half-smile, lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “It’s funnier in our language,” he says to Fjord quietly and he feels a huff of what might have been a laugh escape through his nose.

“Can you see the _Bath_? Can you make it out?” The metal hull is brushed ebony and, even with the ability to see shapes and shades of grey in this type of light, it could easily blend into the background.

“Mhm-hm,” is his answer.

“Yasha,” Fjord calls out, hopes that the ship-wide channel was still open.

“I see her.” Jester hums a song to herself that Fjord doesn’t recognize, makes soft noises as she moves forward along the sand, hopefully following the same path the drone had taken and, less than a minute later (forty seconds, Fjord knows because he was counting, a minute fewer than she had promised), Jester says: “Hello, _Grimpo_. Don’t worry, we’ll get you home.”

“Can you see what’s wrong with it?” Beau asks and Fjord wants to say _we don’t have time for that_ , they can sort that out once they’re both back inside but Jester is answering her before he can get his mouth open.

“Hmm. There’s a _pretty bad_ hole in it. The metal was eaten away. But I can’t tell what went wrong on its insides. It looks all like a mess to me.” ( _These weren’t torn off. It fell apart_ , Caleb had said when Fjord had brought him the scrap from the much large piece taken from the _Johnsonii_.) “Okay little guy, lets go.” A grunt from Jester, from her likely giving the _Grimpo_ a shove, and she’s on her way.

Only two seconds pass before they all hear her make a noise of surprise and then, in less time than that, Yasha says, “Hey...” right around the same moment that Jester says slowly, “Uh… Guys?”

“What?” Fjord doesn’t get a response right away. “What is it?”

“It’s here,” Jester says and Fjord feels a chill down his spine. He eyes the suits hanging on their hooks, attempts to determine how fast he could get himself dressed in one, tries to decide if he could risk using his Falchion underwater because it wasn’t made to work in those conditions but it’s possible the unwanted modifications might have changed that, too. He wouldn’t know unless he did it but he could just as easily lose it as well and it was the only weapon he had other than his knife. He should have brought it down here with him. He didn’t think there’d be time enough to go get it.

“‘Here’,” Fjord repeats. Boots. Body. Gloves. Helmet. “Where is ‘here’ exactly?” He glances at Molly but he can’t put a pin on what he’s thinking.

“Right in front of me. A couple feet… maybe? A little more? _Grimpo_ is between us.”

“What’s it doing?” Beau asks.

“Nothing,” Jester responds, speaking as if she was barely moving her lips to allow the sound to get out, as if as soon as she had seen the _thing_ , she had gone completely still. “I think it’s facing me because its toes are pointing in my direction. Unless its legs are on backwards.” She breathes in with a gasp. “What do I do?” He could tell her to push the drone into it, use it as a distraction and then swim like hell for the _Bathynomus_ , but he has no way of knowing if that would work, has no way to judge how _intelligent_ this creature was; it could fall for it easily or barely get knocked off kilter and then make a run for Jester. It certainly seemed faster than any of them, managed to bound out in front of her without Jester even noticing. Would the suit hold up to being touched by it? _He just didn’t know_.

“Don’t do anything,” Fjord says. “I’m coming out there.” Outnumber it. Confuse it. Scare it, maybe.

“I’m coming with,” Molly says, starts making his way to one of the cubbies, lifting a suit from one of its holders. “I haven’t gotten a chance to leave the ship yet. I’m already overdue. You’re the last one, Nott,” he calls out.

“Not in a million years,” comes the reply. Fjord finds the suit he had worn earlier, still slightly damp in places, and starts to pull the thick material around his body, sitting on the bench to slide his legs through, jam his feet in the heavy boots. He has his arms through the sleeves, hands shoved into the gloves when Jester says: “Maybe I could just… give it a little punch.”

“No!” Fjord says sternly. “Jester, do _not_.” He twists on the helmet, crouches awkwardly on the floor to open the case holding his gun but his breath keeps fogging the clear front, makes it a hassle to see what he was doing so he takes it off, just for a minute, just until he’s got his Falchion ready to go. _Snap snap_ , the catches come undone, the lid lifted, and there it is, untouched since he brought it on board. He inspects it, makes sure that it’s loaded and, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Molly taking two long-barrel pistols out of his own container.

“Just one,” Jester is saying, “Right in the eye. That always hurts.”

“Jester...” Fjord discourages, not for the first—nor the second—time that day.

“She’s doing it,” Yasha says.

“Jester,” Nott chimes in, “Maybe you should—” She’s interrupted by a _yelp_ and Yasha muttering softly, “Oh no.” Jester doesn’t say anything coherent; the channel is static, crackling, cut-off but it sounds like she’s shouting, _fighting_ and then _,_ just barely cutting through the noise, Yasha: “I won’t get down there in time.” Her way of saying _get the lead out of your boots, she needs your help._

“Goddammit,” Fjord says through gritted teeth, doesn’t have an extra moment to check and double check anymore. There’s another cry, something that might have been _pain_. “Shit.” He’s on his feet, Falchion gripped tight in one hand, a rushing noise in his ears. He let her go out there, he said it was fine because he didn’t want to _command_ any of them, didn’t want to be in charge and now she was in trouble. All he’s thinking is the same thing Jester had said when sending the drone out to the monster earlier: _go go go_.

Fjord bounds over to the tube—the soles of his shoes hitting hard against the ground—the door opens at his presence, and he steps inside. It closes with a hiss and he spares a glance to Molly, making sure that he was ready to follow directly after him.

_Six, five—_

Everything suddenly seems to shift into slow motion: Fjord watches as Molly’s cool-headed outward appearance shifts rapidly into one of pure horror **.** His pistols leave his hands, clattering to the floor.

— _Four, three—_

Molly swivels, runs towards the panel he’d abandoned to get dressed. It’s strange, Fjord thinks, that he heard Molly’s weapons making any sort of sound, that he heard the hiss of the door, multiple people shouting.

A voice in the back of his head tells him to look at the floor where his weapon case was still sitting. There, resting right beside it on the floor, is his helmet.

— _Two, one._

“Huh,” Fjord hears himself say. The hatch slides away and he plunges feet-first into the ocean.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

& & & &

 

The first thing that goes through Fjord’s mind is: _I’m dead_. When he realizes he isn’t, he figures it’s a reprieve, one final point in time to consider how badly he screwed up and make his final thought a good one before his head explodes. But nothing happens. He doesn’t die.

He holds his breath until he can’t and then opens his mouth, waits for the icy water to fill his lungs, drowning him, but he feels his throat close off instead and he does not suffocate because of it. His skin feels nothing. Not cold. Not wet. Numb. For a second, he hears the same beeping that was in his ear when he wore the suit the first time, that he heard again when standing in Jester’s medical room but then it stops.

What is this? _What the hell is he?_

His Falchion still clutched in his hand, he launches himself forward as he had before, swims towards the _Johnsonii_ , the abandoned drone, the fiend that was skirmishing with something by the wreck. He stops himself a few feet away, sees Jester standing right beside the gaping hole in the hull, arms flailing seemingly ineffectually. He opens his mouth to call out to her but no sound comes out and he narrows his eyes, because he swears he can see Jester _flicker_. His eyes are playing tricks on him; he blinks rapidly but nothing changes and then he remembers, vaguely, Jester telling Elva back at the warehouse: _I have a Duplicity._ She must have put it on her belt but he hadn’t even seen her do it—not that he knew what one looked like. But if her Duplicate is there, then where was _she_.

There’s a panic burning in his chest but he struggles to ignore it. Jester had to be here somewhere, was probably hiding, but he couldn’t look for her with that thing still lingering there. It hadn’t noticed him yet but it would (it would, wouldn’t it?) and so he lifts his gun, rolls his shoulders and pulls the trigger. A burst snaps out of the barrel, a bullet carving through the saltwater, slams into the monster. Its feet slip, sliding on nothing. It tumbles, twists with the impact, arms thrashing, Jester’s Duplicate ignored, and Fjord takes the opportunity to circle around the back of the _Johnsonii_ , finds Jester crouched there, relatively unharmed.

She startles, peers up at the figure hanging over her and her eyes widen. Her lips move, rapid-fire, but Fjord can’t understand her. He shakes his head and she stops talking. They stare over the top of the ship and the monster has found its footing, is scrambling towards them at an exceptional speed. Fjord moves slightly over, covering as much of Jester as he can, holds his Falchion up again but the next shot comes from somewhere else and they both turn their heads to see Molly swimming in their direction, pistols raised, slits in the sides of the barrels glowing red. The bright plasma cuts into the thin skin, slicing it open, but it does not bleed.

Molly has one of Caleb’s Dancing Lights behind him and he reaches for it, launches it towards the monster. It goes sailing, twirling around it and the creature attempts to grab at the luminous object with one of its arms.

Jester glides behind Fjord, heads towards Molly but then turns back at the last second, grabs the drone and starts pulling it, dragging it along with her as she makes her way in the direction of the Bathynomus. Molly hesitates briefly when he sees Fjord and then refocuses, sends off another shot with his left hand; it goes wide, misses. He tries again with his right and, this time, it hits. Following the path Jester had taken without the detour, Fjord stops at Molly’s side, the two of them targeting straight ahead but it’s not coming at them, not yet, and so Fjord takes one hand from his weapon, puts it on Molly’s shoulder and pushes him, directs him back towards the ship.  
  
Backwards, drifting slowly, still aiming, he’s about to pivot and pursue his crew-mates but he stalls. They won’t know anything about it unless Caleb has a chance to scan it, to study it properly, and Fjord has the feeling that there’s no chance that they could convince him to come out here. Adjusting his arms, he goes to take a steadying breath but can’t and starts simply firing instead. One, two, three, four. He punches four holes in it and then swings the Falchion over a shoulder and propels himself forward.

He does exactly what he told Jester not to do and directs a blow right into the monster, fist connecting with one of the larger lumps. The matter that the monster is made of gives easily under the typically unsubstantial impact of his punch and Fjord’s arm sinks into it, the glove and sleeve of his suit not protecting him as he hoped and it instantly disintegrates, dissolving up to the crease in his elbow. There is no pain. The creature fights him, shakes him, and Fjord pulls his arm back but it’s stuck; his hand grabs something solid but he can’t figure out what it is and he uses his other arm to twirl his gun back around. He fumbles with the trigger—this wasn’t meant to be used single-handedly—and the arm still stuck feel _wrong_ , the beeping is back.

Using a foot, he tries to push against the figure but—with nothing against his back—he makes zero progress. The arms—having abandoned the Dancing Light—are now coming for _him_ but it seems to be favoring the smallest limb, the Dwarven one, and it can’t quite reach him. Fjord tries for the gun again, gets it straight, presses the stock against his side and fires. This close, the bullet (the last one) rips through, sending the form propelling backwards. The motion releases Fjord’s arm and, instead of coming back for more or swimming away, the body goes limp and stops moving.

Fjord doesn’t give himself a once over, isn’t thinking about that, catches up to the now eerily still figure before it quietly floats away and grabs the hand on the slender arm without looking at himself, without wondering _how_ he was able to still use his hand if it was likely nothing but bone, starts pulling it along behind him as he finally starts to make his way back to the ship.

The hatch has been left open and he sends the (now very much dead) body up first, trusts that they’ll manage to sort out how to remove it without hurting themselves. The door closes and he waits, one minute, two minutes, three— but the hatch never unseals and he wonders if they were going to leave him out there, if Jester and Molly thought they were collectively hallucinating and that Fjord had died and he hadn’t been there at all but then a couple feet away, a much larger section of the _Bathynomus_ ’ belly disengages.

 _That must be_ , he thinks, _where the drone comes out of_. But it’s broken and they can’t send it out. So what were they doing? A realization then: _They want me to climb up through there instead_. Moving over to it, he reaches for the lip of the opening and, using both hands, he hauls himself up and over, the top half of his body hitting the floor. He digs his fingers into _nothing_ —can’t get a grip on a smooth surface—but there’s nobody to help him because the small space is filling with water and pounds of pressure. His throat is still closed and _now_ —now that he’s inside—he feels as if he’s asphyxiating.

He extends an arm blindly, manages to seize onto something heavy, something bolted to the ground, and _drags_ himself the rest of the way out of the ocean. Fjord lies there for a moment, dripping wet, listens to the _clang_ of the door sliding shut. His throat finally unblocks and he takes in a few gasping breaths.

Another door opening. Footsteps. Jester shouts “Fjord!” and he rolls over to look at them, watches as they pile into the room but then come suddenly to a screeching halt, their faces all a slightly different flavor of distress. “Fjord,” Jester repeats, quietly this time. “Your arm.” He props himself up, lifts the arm that had just been elbow-deep inside the monster. He turns the limb, flexes his hand, and pearly metal glints in the low light.

Fjord blinks at it. Speechless. The beeping returns—loud, so damn loud, he can’t hear anything _but_ that—and then, like someone snapped their fingers, the entire world goes dark.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord is suspended in a vacuum. He’s starfished, his legs and arms outstretched and he cannot shift them, stuck as if they were being held down. He tries to move his head, to observe the void of his surroundings, to try and find _something_ other than himself here but that, too, refuses to move. There is an attempt, a _want_ to struggle, but he cannot feel himself. He has a body, he can _see it_ , but he only knows it’s there because he’s already aware that he has one. The _memory_ of one.

A dread starts to ring in his ears, he sees his chest heaving. _He’s hyperventilating_.

_Beep beep beep beep beep bee—_

A large glowing ball of energy, rings similar to an eye in the center of it, appears suddenly in front of him but the light doesn’t blind him. Tendrils radiate around it, it sways, back and forth, back and forth as if observing him. It hums, low. The noise slides into a deep voice, words spoken without a mouth.

“Calm.” Fjord feels his breathing steady, but there is still an anxiety lingering. Buzzing.

“What is this?” He hears the question in his head, can only assume that he’s speaking.

“Blocked.”

“Blocked?” Fjord repeats. “What does that— What’s happened to me?”

“Do not worry.”

“Who are you?” Fjord asks.

“I am one who made you.”

“Made— Made me? What does that mean?”

“Blocked,” the voice responds.

“Am I talking to you? Is this… right now? Or am I remembering? Did this already happen?” He can’t tell. There is no _time_ here. There is nothing here.

“Yes.”

“Why am I like this?” Fjord asks. “Why can’t I move?”

“Blocked.”

“Tell me.”

“Blocked.”

“ _Tell me_ ,” Fjord demands, tries to sound _angry_. Determined. Commanding. But he’s painfully aware of the fear in his voice. It’s now that he notices his accent is gone. He doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds… flat. The energy ball—the eye—undulates. Stretches out a silence.

“A glimpse,” the eye finally says.

There’s a flash of bright light, blazing, painful. Fjord is no longer in a void but a white room. He’s not being held by nothing; he’s strapped to a vertical table, arms and legs held down, but they aren’t _his_ arms and legs, they’re polished, ivory metal. His whole body is _this_. _He has no skin._ He can’t feel himself. He can’t feel anything.

Figures move around him, indistinguishable. Blobs. Formless. They whisper, words overlapping. They don’t make sense.

_Watching. Potential. Learn. Grow. Provoke. Consume. Reward. Patience._

The panic returns. The beeping returns.

He hears his own voice: _What is this? What are you doing to me? What is this? What have you done to me?_ Over and over. Looped. Panic, panic, panic—

The memory fades like wet paint being washed clean from a wall. Fjord is back in the nothingness again with the energy, unable to move.

“Why?” He asks because what else was there?

“Potential,” the eye says and then: “We will meet again.”

The energy pulls away, falls into a pinprick in the distance and then disappears. Disembodied, it speaks one last time:

“Wake up.”

 

& & & &

 

Fjord opens his eyes.

He clears his throat, his head heavy, and everything from before this exact moment is muddled: stray voices that might have been from a dream, lights that were far too bright, someone saying his name. Something is saying—

“Fjord!” Jester says, sounds surprised and Fjord is moving, the top half of him lifting up, the bed he hadn’t realized he was lying on (unrestrained, and why did he worry that he might be?) supporting him into a sitting position. He’s in the medical room but how he got here is a piece of information meandering slowly to the front of his head. As soon as he realizes where he is—the machines warbling, displays with unreadable data which could have been about him but likely not, backlit cabinets with bottles and opaque boxes—he feels that urge to run but he squashes it just like he had the last time the two of them were occupying this same space together.

Jester has a portable tablet clutched in her hands which she attaches to a rig sticking out of the wall, turns the screen towards herself. Instinct or she’s purposely hiding something from him. She gives him a smile.

“Fjord—”

“What happened?” He asks. Her smile falters.

“You had a big fight with that nasty creature under the water.” That’s right. He’d gone out to help Jester. He killed it. He _brought it back_. But that didn’t explain why he was— “It hurt your arm pretty bad.” Indicates at his right side with a loosely pointed finger. The hand is wrapped completely in thick layers Second Skin—typically used for treating victims of severe burns—the rest of his arm double-casted right up to his elbow in the material for setting a broken bone. It’s thick and clumsy and he tries to move his fingers, gets them to bend but, when he touches his index finger to the pad of his thumb, he doesn’t feel it. He tries the other fingers, too, but they’re all the same. He can’t, in fact, feel much of anything from his fingertips to his elbow.

The impulse to leave and to do so _immediately_ increases, the breaths he’s taking in and out through his nose quickening. This reaction feels strangely familiar, as if this isn’t the first time a terror was making its home in his chest.

“How long have I— How long have I been out?”

“Six hours,” she tells him. “I did all I knew how to do, you know? I gave you a very heavy dose of Revivify but it did nothing. I even had Nott take a look at you—” (Nott? Why would _Nott_ be able to do something for him? He has the impression that he should know the answer to that but it’s just _not coming_.) “—But she couldn’t figure it out either. So we left you and hoped that you would wake up on your own.” She chews on the inside of her bottom lip for a moment. “We had to do some stuff while you were out. We’re— Well. You’ll find out. But Fjord?” She says his name like a question, waiting for him to acknowledge, encourage her to continue. “Why didn’t you tell us you could do that?”

“Do what?” There. Just _there_ , scrabbling to come through a pile of rubble, is the explanation, but something else is holding him back from it.

“Breathe underwater,” she says, “Without a helmet. Your brain should be pulp. You should have been _crushed_.” _You should have died_. She won’t say it but she doesn’t have to. “But you weren’t! And your arm… I tried to fix it.” Fjord’s brows furrow and he frowns. Jester mimics his expression. “You don’t remember?” He shakes his head. “Fjord. You’re a robot.” She turns the tablet around and Fjord finds himself staring at a full-body scan, _his_ full-body scan but—instead of organs, muscles, _bones_ —all he sees is metal and machinery.

It hits him like a Mammoth Shuttle going two-hundred miles-per-hour.

 _A glimpse_.

He climbs off the table, ignores Jester telling him to _stop, wait_ , and walks out of the room.


	2. BREAKWATER.

“FTIU Agent Alison Rios. April 17, 2105. The time is 1430. I am interviewing Fjord…” Alison hesitates, glances to the Half-Orc sitting across from her. There’s a look in his eyes that makes it seem like he’s currently half-a-mile away from the room they’re sitting in. She taps the top of the table with a finger to get his attention. This isn’t where she wanted to do this; it _should_ be back at their offices in Abilene but the Border Station in Corpus Christi—where both the damaged _Catterick_ and Fjord had been brought after they were found—said they were _uncomfortable_ letting either of them leave. So she had been sent here instead.

“Fjord is fine,” he says, clearing his throat.

“Fjord.” He didn’t _have_ to tell her. She could find it later or, maybe, he was just one of those species that didn’t come from somewhere that gave their people last names. That always seemed strange to her but, then again, she was an Elf with a human name, raised from the age of fifty in a place called Truth or Consequences. So who the heck was she to judge? “You know who I work for, yes?” He nods. “I’m required to tell you that I am authorized to give you an injection of ZOT to compel you to tell me the truth. But I don’t like it, so I’m not going to use it.” She pauses again. “Will you be honest with me?”

“Of course,” Fjord says. “Although that could already be a lie.”

“It could. Let’s hope it’s not.” Alison sorts through the paper-thin tablets stacked in front of her, leans forward and folds her hands together. “So let’s start at the beginning. What happened?” It’s a broad question. He could begin where he wanted. She’s interested to see where he chooses.

“I was a week into a contract on the _Catterick_ ,” Fjord starts, “I was mostly moving freight, but they knew I could pilot. They’d let me take a shift occasionally.” He stops, flexes his right hand and then curls it into a fist, folds his left one over it.

“Okay,” Alison says, encouraging.

“We were attacked. Came out of nowhere.”

“By who?”

“I have no idea. But whoever it was, we couldn’t defend ourselves.” She takes note of the fact that he uses the word ‘we’ and ‘ _our_ selves’, not ‘they’ or ‘ _them_ selves’. That was good. “I remember I was running somewhere but I’m not sure where I was going. The ship was exploding around me. People were— There was a loud noise, right by me. I felt a lot of pain. And then I—” A breath, exhaled through his nose. “I woke up, surrounded by bodies and debris. A few hours later, the ship was boarded by APS. And here I am.” He unfolds his hands briefly to splay them, a _that’s it_ gesture, before pulling them back to how they were. That was exactly what he told the APS Officer who questioned him on the ride back to Earth, give or take a few different words. She’d watched the drone footage herself ten minutes before walking in here.

What struck her the most about it wasn’t how almost unbelievable the story itself was but how calmly Fjord told it both times.

“How long were you out there?” He shakes his head as a response. Alison picks up one of the tablets, reads from it. “The USE _Artsebarsky_ made the call about a ‘heavily damaged cargo ship, dead in the water’ on the eleventh. The APS got to you on the fourteenth. You arrived back on Earth this morning. When were you attacked?” Try that instead. She sees him thinking, doing the math.

“The twenty-eighth—” He sighs. “—Of March.” Alison furrows her eyebrows, feels her lips push tightly together. Frowning.

“You’re missing two weeks.” She’s not asking but Fjord answers her anyway.

“I suppose so, yes.” She lets that hang in the air for a moment, goes over the timeline in her head. An unknown assailant. Everyone dies— Correction: _almost_ everyone dies. What in the world could Fjord have been doing on a broken ship for two weeks? She’d talked to the APS engineers (they’d hung around once they had landed; the Border Station didn’t have the right people for the job and Alison’s agency wasn’t going to send the cavalry until they were sure this was even a case at all)—they had only done a cursory once-over but the woman in charge, coveralls already stained with soot and grease, told her that no one had attempted even the most basic of repairs. Not to the engines, to the escape shuttles that hadn’t been blasted into space through a gaping hole in the hull, not the communications to send a message. What food and water that wasn’t destroyed was untouched.

Had he just laid there, doing nothing? He wasn’t suffering from starvation. Dehydration. In the report, an APS Officer noted that it was almost minus-nine Celsius when they’d gotten on board. But Fjord was awake. Alert. _Alive_. Completely unharmed.

“Have you seen a doctor yet?” Alison asks next. The composure that Fjord had been maintaining displaces and, for the first time since she sat down, she sees real fear flash in his eyes. She also sees him visibly reign it in.

“No,” he says.

“It says that you refused to let the doctor on the APS vessel give you a scan.” She pauses. “I know you _look_ okay, but physical injuries aren’t always evident at first and with you missing time...” His jaw tightens. “I can’t force you to go but I really think—”

“No,” Fjord says again, “Thank you.” Alison nods, sits back in her seat, taps the table again but not to get his attention this time. Simply out of habit. “Interview concluded. 1455.” The look he gives her clearly reads: _really?_ She shrugs one shoulder. _For now_. “Trauma,” she says, “Can manifest in different ways.” He looks surprised to hear the word.

“I don’t feel particularly traumatized,” Fjord replies. “Maybe that’s part of it.” Alison stares at him, reaches out to reposition the tablets.

“You’re the lone survivor. The only one out of five-hundred to make it out,” she says. “It’ll hit you eventually. And what happened will come back to you, too. Sometimes… Sometimes the brain walls up the shitty stuff because remembering it is too uncomfortable. But it won’t stay that way forever. I’d be worried if it did.”

“Do you think I did this?” Fjord asks after a stretch of silence.

“I don’t. They’ll probably still look into you anyway but I’ve read your background. You don’t seem the type.”

“Well,” Fjord says. “That’s good, then.” Alison stands up, collects her things and heads for the exit. There were other people to talk to, bodies to look over, and she’d probably be back to question him at least once more before the day was done. Just before leaving, her hand hovering over the panel to unlock the door, she looks back at him.

“Whatever it is that you can’t remember… I’m really sorry you went through that.” She gets nothing in return.


	3. PART II.

Fjord has no idea how long he’s been sitting in the cockpit but it’s highly doubtful that it was anywhere near as long as it felt. He sits and sits and quietly tries to repackage the memories, the _realizations_ , back where they had come from, in some dark corner of his brain (his _hard_ _computer of a brain_ , the image from Jester’s scan burned into him) where the things that had done this to him had kept it stored away. There was a myth, a human myth that was more than a thousand years old that had to do with a box and horrors being released from it but he can’t recall for the life of him what it was called.

 _What use is it having a computer in your head_ , Fjord thinks, _if you can’t use it like one?_

He laughs but there’s no mirth behind it. Is this why he was suddenly so fearful of doctors? He was _programmed_ to avoid them because the second they ran a single test on him they would know. _He_ would know. It had been, he thought, a symptom of some sort of lingering mental anguish caused by an ordeal he couldn’t even remember but now—

How could he not have known? How could he have looked at himself in the mirror every morning and _not known he wasn’t real_. That was the point though, was it? They didn’t _want_ him to be conscious of it. They wanted him to go on about each day believing that he was still meat.

He rubs his unbandaged hand over his face and then pulls it away, stares at it, at the skin and his fingers and the lines on his palm. He wasn’t himself. Fjord was not Fjord. The childhood he remembers is not the one this body lived through. The scars on his face were painted on. It was like copying an image and then throwing away the original. Like a parent accidentally breaking their child’s favorite toy and then going out to buy a new one, scuffing and scratching it to match the first and hoping the little idiot won’t notice the difference.

There had been a billionaire who had a version of himself uploaded to a computer just a few months after Fjord had started to make his home on Earth. He was sick and too old and this was a way to preserve himself, to keep his company in his name and not his son’s or his grandchildren. His money would stay his and no one else’s. That had been the _plan_ but, after it was done, it sparked a debate that was still going: did he still count as a person? It wasn’t _him_ anymore. It was a sophisticated program that had studied him for years, learned his history, his quirks, and then extrapolated from terabytes of data to manufacture his personality and predict how he would respond to problems and talk to his family, his employees, his _maid_.

( _If we call this a person_ , some people said, _where would it stop? Are we gonna call our vacuum cleaners people now, too?_ )

Fjord had been engrossed for awhile but, as with everything, it became old news, sporadic updates for the few people who were still interested. Last he’d heard, the computer with the version of the man on it was living in his daughter’s mansion, not understanding why he still spent every other day in a courtroom. One of the trials had been broadcast and Fjord had watched as a black box was placed on the stand, listened to a lawyer explain that he still had the attributes required of a person—reason, morality, self-consciousness—they just all existed as metal and code.

That was all Fjord was now, too. The only difference is that he hadn’t _wanted_ this; he didn’t ask to be this way, although it would be a lie to say that, at the time of the attack, he had wished he would have been killed along with everyone else. He has a sudden flashback to lying on the steel floor of the _Catterick—_ people screaming around him, the ship burning and falling apart—and loudly asking a hole in the ceiling to not let him die there. Two seconds later, a body with rebar shoved clean through it’s chest had fallen through the same exact hole. It’d landed on top of Fjord and skewered him to the floor. (How much else of what happened up there did the beings who did this to him bury? Did they think they were doing him a favor? Maybe they did. But it was too late now.)

They had heard him or it was just coincidence. They had simply passed by, investigated, or they were the ones who attacked them. Fjord closes his eyes, tries to bring himself back to that nothingness he had been in before but all he sees are the backs of his eyelids, hears the ambient noises of the _Bathynomus_. This certainly, at least, explained why he’d wake from nightmares with the taste of metal in the back of his throat. Explained a lot of bizarre little changes he’d found in himself and dismissed. Explained the modifications to his Falchion. A going-away gift, perhaps. A fancy modded gun for the price of one entire sense of self.

The door opens and Fjord opens his eyes, exhales slowly. He hadn’t locked it because he couldn’t, had hoped that the others would respect the fact that it was shut and treat it as if it were. And they had, for a time. Apparently not anymore.

“I’m not in the mood for company,” Fjord says without turning to see who it is, a polite way to say _get the hell out_. He still has a panic sitting inside him, waiting to unleash. He should be going berserk. Whoever walked in should find him on the floor, the console in pieces because there was nothing else in here to destroy. Truthfully, he probably deserves to allow himself to let it happen. If he was anywhere else, if he was alone, if he wasn’t on a _schedule_ , he might have.

“I’m sure,” Molly says but he doesn’t leave. “Far be it from me to make assumptions about anyone but I’m going to take a guess and say that you weren’t aware of any of this.”

Fjord merely grunts in response. He hadn’t noticed until now that the shielding over the windows had been brought down at some point. He has no idea where they are, if they’d even gone anywhere at all.

“For what it’s worth,” Molly continues, “I think you’re remarkable. All the other robots I’ve met have been disasters.” Fjord grimaces and then feels a sad laugh bubble briefly up from his throat. AI still had a long way to go; there were a lot of years ahead before more machines like _him_ would be walking around like everyone else. As far as Fjord knew, he was the only one of his kind—the only one outside of a laboratory, at least, that didn’t look like boxes or toys or animals. “Except for maybe Frumpkin,” Molly adds.

“Don’t—” Fjord sighs. _Don’t call me a robot._

“Noted,” Molly tells him, as if Fjord had completed his sentence. He wants (he _needs_ ) to talk about something else, just for a few minutes.

“Jester said… She said you had to ‘do some stuff’ while I was… incapacitated.”

“Ah, yes,” Molly replies. “L&N called while you were out. The conversation was… fumbled, to put it lightly. No need for the gory details. We had to promise we’d get ourselves to the next destination. And so we’re here.”

“At the trench,” Fjord says. “Why’s the shielding down?”

“Not much to see.” Fjord can hear the shrug in his voice. “The ship is doing most of the work anyhow.” A glance to the console he had been avoiding and, on the center screen, is a black and white topographical map of the interior trench, information scrawling in lines along the bottom of most of it, constantly being updated. The only way that they could have this clear of a picture is either because the drone had been down there or—

“We’re inside it.”

“Not very far down,” Molly assures him. “Beau and Nott have been working on the drone but it’s slow progress, from what I hear. Kind of funny, if you think about it. That we wound up doing exactly what L&N wanted after all.” That answered one of Fjord’s other questions at least—what happened with the drone. “Of course, none of that is the truly interesting bit. Caleb’s been studying that creature you shoved up the tube.”

“What’s he found?” Fjord asks. He still won’t turn around to face Molly and Molly, in turn, hasn’t stepped up to be seen. It’s strange, talking to someone in the same room as you and only hearing them but Fjord isn’t entirely sure he _wants_ to be looked at yet. He has no idea how they’ll react and—even if they do their best to keep a straight and collected face around him—it’s impossible to completely cover up disdain. In the unbelievably short time they’ve known each other (it’s only been less than a week and things have already gone so topsy-turvy that Fjord’s head was spinning) they’d never discussed their personal feelings on Artificial Intelligence. There hadn't been a reason to. They’d all seemed to have taken to Caleb’s cat well enough but that was an _animal_. Nobody’s ever felt threatened by a housepet, flesh-born or otherwise. Even the most vocal anti-AI people probably secretly bought a Synth-Hamster for their grandkid.

Robots that looked like humans—like _aliens_ —was a whole other issue entirely. The last thing Fjord needed was to find himself on board with six Con-Cys and no way to make an early exit without revealing himself to a hundred more people thousands of feet above him.

“A lot. And also not very much at all.”

“What?”

“I could explain it but I guarantee that it’s much more interesting if you see it for yourself,” Molly says. He exhales loudly through his nose. “Any other day of the week, I’d say you could hide away for as long as you want, but there’s only so much captaining one man can do from a single room.”

“I’m not—” Fjord starts to say but Molly interrupts him.

“Psh. We both know that isn’t true.” A momentary hush. “We’ve given you four hours. There’ll be time to go to pieces later.” But Fjord doesn’t move. Molly is quiet for a long enough amount of time that Fjord almost starts to think that he’d left and the sounds he was mistaking for breaths was the ship working around him but then, finally, Molly steps forward, stands alongside Fjord’s chair. “I’m not unfamiliar with losing an identity.” Fjord glimpses side-long at him, but Molly is staring straight ahead. “I’ve only been Mollymauk Tealeaf for two years.”

“Who were you before that?” Fjord asks.

“Does it matter?” Molly replies. “The truth is, you could be what people tell you—or, in your case, what they made you—or you can be whoever you damn well want. Fuck everyone else.”

“I can’t just _ignore_ what I’ve been turned into.”

“Why not?” Molly queries. “Be you. Stay you. Worry about all the other bullshit later. Now come on.” The press of lips to the side of Fjord’s head, just by his hairline, happens so fast that Fjord’s not even sure that it had happened at all and, by the time he turns his chair to ask about it, Molly is already walking away. “We’ve got work to do.”

 

& & & &

 

Jester is on the other side of the door when it opens and she stumbles backwards as if she had her head pressed against it trying to listen to their conversation and hadn’t heard them coming. She lights up when she sees Fjord behind Molly, who slides past her and then stops at the end of the short hallway.

“Are you alright?” Was he? Not really, not in the slightest, and he’s sure it’d be awhile before he would be again.

“For now,” Fjord says, which was true enough. He didn’t feel _real_. He didn’t know if he was himself anymore—and, if he wasn’t, then who (or what) was he? But he could pretend.

“Time has gone all weird down here but since it _is_ technically morning, I brought you breakfast,” Jester says, produces a napkin-wrapped pastry from her pocket. It’s still a mystery to him where she was hiding them. “But then I realized _oh no_ what if you don’t eat anymore? What if you thought you _had_ to eat because you didn’t know you were a robot”—Fjord feels himself flinch—“But that now that you know, you don’t need it. I mean, you ate before so it had to go somewhere and I guess it tasted good but— So maybe, I thought, I’d give it to Frumpkin but then I remembered he’s a robot, too and I haven’t seen him eat _anything_ so—”

“I’ll take it,” Fjord says, cutting her off. “I can eat.” He can eat and he finds that he _wants_ to eat. That hadn’t changed. The _purpose_ behind it may have, but the artificial ache in his stomach because he hasn’t had any food in awhile was still there. The little things, the _normal_ things that were there only to not give him a reason to think he was anything other than what he believed he was. The dough is flaky, sticky, and it falls apart when he takes a piece off of it. He’s painfully aware of everything he does now, every movement, every sensation, the way his teeth chew on his food, how he swallows. It’s agony.

Somehow, he manages not to let any of it display on his face.

“Did Molly tell you about the creature?” Jester asks.

“Not… exactly,” Fjord says, starts walking towards the ladder, still hasn’t decided where he’s going.

“ _Molly_ ,” Jester chastises, looks to him with a slight tilt of her head, “Why didn’t you tell him? He might have come out sooner!”

“Yes, but where’s the fun in that?” This garners him a smile and a _yeah, I suppose you’re right_.

“Okay. So you _need_ to see—”

“Beau and Nott,” Fjord says, interrupting her again, “Are they still working on the drone?”

“Pretty sure,” Jester replies.

“Then I think I’d like to check on them first.” Jester says she’ll go with him, but there’s no hint that she’s doing it to keep an eye on him, because she doesn’t _trust him_. She just wants to tag along, is all. Before he completely descends down the hole, he looks up at his two companions standing above him, staring back down. He searches their faces for fear or hatred, caught when they thought he wouldn’t see, but there’s none of that there and he’s not sure why that makes him sad.

 

& & & &

 

Instead of the engine room, Fjord is lead to the rec room and he nearly trips over a heavy, dark piece of junk just a few steps away from the doorway as soon as he walks in. The place has turned into a disaster area: the couch and chairs have been pushed to the walls, off to the sides, leaving the floor one giant open space, which has been taken over by hundreds of metal parts, some large and many no bigger than Fjord’s fist and seemingly in no particular order. Fjord has visions of old Earth cartoons, animated characters rummaging through chests filled with trash, throwing it over their shoulder with no mind to where it all landed.

The drone itself has been stripped down to the bare bones, it’s insides revealed to the world, exposed for all to see and, if Fjord stares at it for a little bit longer than necessary, thinking: _that’s what I look like inside, too_ he doesn’t outwardly acknowledge it. Nott is sitting on the floor by the bank of computers, a beige metal box in her lap, a thick cable like an umbilical cord stretching from the back of it and into the skeleton machine, Beau kneeling behind the drone, back bent as she examined inside it, but both of them look up when he and Jester appear.

(Molly had parted ways, kept going down, said Jester knew where everyone was, there was something he needed to do.)

Beau is the first to stand, hops over the drone and marches right up to Fjord, her bare feet stepping over the pieces on the floor, and she _slams_ a fist into his upper arm.

“Ah, _hey_ ,” Fjord says, grips the now tender spot where she’s hit him, rubs it. “What the hell was that for?”

“You _know_ what,” Beau says, lifts her arm, bends her elbow like she’s going to do it again but then changes her mind. “What the fuck, dude. You really didn’t know?”

“I really did not know,” Fjord confirms.

“That’s super shitty,” Beau tells him. “I mean, unless you’re cool with it but, I don’t know. I think it’s pretty fucked up. Who did it? How’d it happen?”

“I’m— It’s still in a lot of bits and piece. I’m kinda tryin’ to fit it all together.” There were things he _could_ tell them—about the attack, about what the ball of light had shown him, what it had said, about the fact that a _ball of light_ that looked like an eye spoke to him at all—but even thinking about doing it left a sour taste on his tongue. The fact that they knew this much about him, that he didn’t find this out in private and have the option of keeping it that way, was frustrating enough as it was.

“Do you know how long?” Nott pipes up from where she hasn’t moved from. “How long you’ve been a Tin Man?”

“ _Nott_ ,” Jester admonishes. Fjord has never heard the term before but, with the way Jester reacted to it, it didn’t seem like it was a kind one. Nott hadn’t said it with any malice, though.

“Not long,” Fjord says. “It... It’s recent.”

“But how do you know? How can you be sure?” Nott prods at him, the inquiry poking at him like a sharp stick.

“I’ve been to the doctor before— Well. I’ve been to doctors. Someone, somewhere along the lines would have said something.”

“Would they?”

“What’re you trying to do to me here, Nott?” Fjord asks instead of feeding into her spiral of possible conspiracies.

“Nothing,” she says, starts turning the metal box over and over in her hands. “I was just wondering.”

“Doctor Beau, Doctor Nott. How is my little boy?” Jester is not subtle about jumping to a new subject.

“Oh yeah,” Beau deadpans, “I mean, look at it. Good as new.” When nobody laughs, she lifts her hands up just past her waist, palms facing the ceiling. “It’s not like I’ve got a whole garage down here. They didn’t really load us up with the tools for a serious repair. I’m working with what I’ve got.”

“Maybe I can help,” Jester says.

“What do you know about fixing machines?”

“Not that much but I am very good at mending things. Maybe you just need someone else to look at it for a minute.”

“Fine,” Beau caves easily, “Go ahead. You can’t make it any worse.” Jester skips away, goes over to the _Grimpo_ and drops to her knees beside it, starts investigating the framework. “Hey.” Fjord glances over, realizes that Beau’s talking to him again. “So are you, like, super strong now? Or have some sort of crazy endurance? If I you got beat up or something, would it matter?”

“What’re you—? I didn’t _activate_ abilities or anything. I’m just— I don’t know. I doubt it. Why?”

“I just mean, you can breathe underwater so. I figured. I haven’t gotten to spar with anyone since I got here and I’m goin’ a little nuts. There’s only so many push-ups, right? I can’t even run laps or anything, the ship’s too fucking small.”

“You want to fight me?”

“Yeah, I guess. If you’re offering. Yasha would be good, too, but I’ve tried to ask and she’s been… I want to _fight_ with her. Get it? But she’s, y’know. _Yasha_. She said she’s worried she’d hurt me.”

“I’ll fight you!” Jester’s face peers at them through the space in the drone’s middle. “I’m not worried!”

“Yeah?” Beau should not have sounded _pleased_ about that but she clearly is. Nott asks something about getting first dibs on their stuff after they’ve killed each other and, while they talk, Fjord walks out of the room, only noticing when he’s standing on the rungs of the ladder that he has no idea where Caleb or the creature currently were. He’d figured that maybe they would be in the room he had just left—considering the monster’s size—but he was clearly proven wrong.

There was no conceivable way there would be enough room in the lab that they had been provided with but he stops by there next, finds the door closed but unlocked and, when he peeks inside without entering, he sees that nothing has changed except for the glaringly obvious: one of the tables—once bolted to the floor—was missing, replaced by an empty coffee cup, either discarded for lack of anywhere else to put it or left there as a joke he doesn’t understand.

The ship itself—as Beau had succinctly put it moments before—wasn’t very big. There were rooms on every floor but most of them were either storage or vacant, as if this vessel wasn’t exactly being used for what it was designed for; nearly indestructible, stealth black outer shell, a specific space for bulky weapons, a single drone, an insufficiently sized lab… The more Fjord thought about it, the more the _Bathynomus_ screamed ‘military’. He hopes it meant that L &N had simply borrowed it from them, a last minute requisition because their schedule hadn’t allowed for any other options but—considering L&N’s behavior and his own very recent experiences with things not being what they seemed—Fjord was having trouble believing that.

The only place he can think of that would have the room adequate enough for what he assumes Caleb would need to do is the space in the bottom of the ship where their suits hung. The same place that Fjord had sent the thing up to ten hours ago. And, so, that’s exactly where he goes.

 

& & & &

 

Not only was the creature’s body still in the tube, but the creature was also _still alive_. Fjord watches as one of the longer arms moves, palm pressing against the clear material, leaving it surprisingly intact, and then pulling away, trying somewhere else, the uneven legs shifting, sliding against a hatch door that remained closed. Someone had soldered the door shut, cut a piece of the tube out and turned it into a makeshift window that was currently closed with a latch that had been drilled into the material. Just above it and slightly to the left, someone had drawn an impressively thick handlebar moustache.

The bullet holes were still there. The ones that Fjord had made in it were smaller than he remembered them being and he’d either misjudged the damage or it was _healing_.

“Fjord.” He hears his name, turns his attention to the rest of the room. The lab’s missing table was now here (he didn’t want to think about _how_ it made its way two floors lower than where it started—although, judging by how beat-up one side of it was, he was starting to get an idea) and it was littered with portable devices, including the one that Caleb had brought out with him when they’d gone to explore the _Johnsonii_. The lights in here had already been somewhat dim but they’d been lowered a bit more, enough to make a noticeable difference but not enough to impede, he assumed, Caleb’s work. There’s a small silver box between the table and the tube, a white light blinking every couple of seconds but Fjord had no idea what its purpose was.

The man in question—the one who had said his name—is standing behind said table, palms resting flat against the surface, a tablet propped up against a heavy piece of technology to help keep it upright. Yasha is positioned behind him in her usual stance, her enormous weapon leaning against one of the cubbies closest to where she was standing. Keeping guard.

“It’s not dead,” Fjord says, stating the obvious, not knowing what else he _could_ say.

“Neither are you,” Caleb replies, glances away from him, back towards the creature in the tube. “Not that I… We weren’t sure at first.” He coughs nervously, swipes a finger across the tablet screen without looking at what he was doing. Fjord hadn’t even thought of that, of the moment that he plummeted into the ocean without his helmet, what the others must have thought before Yasha likely saw him swimming and very much still functioning and then again when he’d pulled himself back inside only to collapse. A slow breath pushes out between barely parted lips. Fjord glances at Yasha, tries to get a read on her and she feels his eyes, looks back fleetingly, just long enough to acknowledge that she noticed. She nods once.

“Good to have you back,” she says. Fjord returns his attention to the tube and it’s occupant.

“So,” he says. “That.”

“Yes. That,” Caleb agrees.

“What happened?”

“Hm. After Yasha and Jester carried you off, we came back here to try and sort out how to remove it from the tube without melting our skin and while we were, uh, having a discussion it started to move,” Caleb explains. He phrases the bit about their discussion as if they were doing anything _but_ having a civil dialogue about their options but, for whatever reason, Caleb did not want to admit that to Fjord.

“And the moustache?” Fjord asks.

“Jester,” Caleb says. “She claims if you stand in just the right spot, it looks as if the creature is wearing it.” Fjord moves around the room and, indeed, if he places himself at the battered edge of the table, it appears as if the monstrosity inside has some quite impressive facial hair. As he’s staring at it, lost briefly in it’s erratic and confused motions, Caleb clears his throat. “I had my suspicions. That something was different with you, I mean.” He waits for Fjord to turn towards him before continuing. “Frumpkin. It was the one kink that Nott could never remove. Likely another one of the reasons why he was pawned in the first place, besides being outdated.” A brief pause. “He hates other AI.” Caleb starts moving his finger across the tablet screen and then peers down at his hand as if he hadn’t even known he was doing it, puts it back down on the table. “I am not my cat.”

“Good to know,” Fjord says and then, because it felt right: “Thank you.”

“Did someone do that to you?” He hears Yasha ask after another lull. “You used to be… not this.”

“Yes,” Fjord answers.

“I’m sorry.” The words spark a vague, hazy memory in Fjord’s head, the voice of someone else saying the same thing to him once before. She says it inelegantly, as if she’s not sure that it’s what she’s supposed to say but Fjord appreciates it, feels that strange sort of sadness in his gut again. Had he _wanted_ them to hate him? Maybe not. Not really. He’d expected it. They barely knew each other, and yet the only one that disliked him now already did before and it was because of an irreversible glitch.

“Yeah,” Fjord says, leaves the _me too_ hanging, unspoken at the end. As always, moving on. “Has it tried to get out?”

“At first,” Caleb says. “But then it stopped. I can’t figure out if it got tired or if it understood it’s situation. Beau cut the hole in the tube so I could scan it. And I put my Silver Thread nearby in case he _does_ get out when I’m not here, as unlikely as that is.” Implying that he hasn’t left and hadn’t _planned_ on leaving. He explains what the Silver Thread was without Fjord having to ask, gestures to the box Fjord had noticed before. “It is not a real thread, of course. A laser. A sort of… tripwire. It will let me know if someone passes through it.” He starts swiping without looking again, back and forth, the same page disappearing and then coming back. “The reason the ship could not identify the creature was because it is made up of six different types of DNA. The computer could not comprehend it.”

“Six. But there were only five people on the _Johnsonii_.”

“Yes. Two humans, a dwarf, a half-elf, a dragonborn,” Caleb rattles off, same as he had when identifying the crew once they realized what parts this thing was made of, “And... Well. Something else. Something alien. Foreign.”

“Alien,” Fjord repeats, looks to the creature again. It’s still not any easier to stare at for too long. He searches for the eye that had been squinting at them, thinks for a second that it had been shot out but then the figure twists and there it is. _Blink blink blink_. “And you can’t tell anything else about it.”

“Not at the moment,” Caleb says. While they had been talking, the eye had been on a swivel, looking around the room, a rolling eyeball in a wide, fearful socket, _blink blink blink_ , but then it settles on Fjord. The impact of the hands hitting the barrier between them is unanticipated, sends Fjord reeling backwards a few steps. The carved-out window rattles, bounces, and a few fingers sneak through the space it leaves but they pull back when they can’t get much further out, start pounding on its makeshift prison again instead.

It had been fine and then it saw Fjord and it was not.

“I think it recognizes you,” Caleb says over the noise from where he’s crouched down behind the table. Yasha has a hand on her gun but hasn’t picked it up yet, preparing in case it breaks free but the enclosure, strangely, seems to be holding. The creature still has a damp sheen to it’s pale skin and it leaves patches of it behind in it’s frenzy. Fjord moves away from it, positions himself behind the table with Caleb, simply to make it easier to hold a conversation and the second that he disappears from the creature’s line-of-sight, it stops it’s furor. “Object permanence…” Fjord hears Caleb mutter to himself, watches as he reaches up blindly above his head to grab for the tablet and, once it’s in his hands, begins furiously pecking at the keypad with his index fingers, writing himself a note.

“Object perm— I think I’ve heard of that. It sounds familiar.” But Caleb doesn’t respond, is too lost in his typing, long, run-on-sentences pouring across the screen. Try something else. Maybe eventually he’d respond. “It’s not disintegrating the ship. Not like it had with the _Johnsonii_ or the _Grimpo_.”

“Or you,” Caleb replies distractedly.

“Or me,” Fjord agrees, conspicuously adjusts his bandaged arm where it’s resting on one of his thighs.

“There are certain… materials,” Caleb says, pausing from what he’s doing with an air of annoyance, “That are resistant to acids. Common in lab equipment.” Fjord wants to point out that Caleb had said ‘equipment’ and not ‘an entire ship’— _I don’t think this ship is meant for science_ —but he doesn’t know how to say it without sounding unreasonably suspicious, possibly one of them jumping down his throat; _we_ are _supposed to kill this thing at the end, right? Did they ever tell us that this was a scientific craft? Really?_ They didn’t. So far, they’ve proven rather adept at skirting their way around concretely saying _a lot_ of things.

But then Yasha says, from across the room: “They are used on military vessels, too.” And there’s that word. Fjord searches her face (she turns away from his gaze but not, seemingly, because she’s trying to hide something—because his scrutiny makes her uncomfortable). He can’t tell if it’s just a passing observation or if she was following the same sort of thought trail he had started hiking down himself. “I don’t know much about it but—”

“I need to concentrate,” Caleb murmurs, but it’s loud enough for the other two to hear and he doesn’t look away from what he’s working on. The creature gives Fjord a few more parting wallops against its confines as he makes his way to the door. He’d like to hear what Yasha has to say, what the next part after _but_ was going to be, except he highly doubts that Caleb would be particularly soothed by the idea of his protection abandoning him, even for a few minutes.

Fjord leaves alone and goes to get himself some coffee. _Who knew_ , he thought, _that computers could get a headache._

 

& & & &

 

“What did I tell you?” Molly asks as soon as Fjord walks in, turns slightly on his stool, a mug settled in front of him. It’s not steaming, but the coffee machine is on and brewing. He’s waiting or he wasn’t drinking but then, who was he brewing it for? “Much more interesting to see for yourself.”

“Yeah,” Fjord replies, goes to get himself an empty mug, figures it’s relatively clean enough and fills it to the brim with boiling hot, dark bitter liquid, “It was a real chucklefest.” He sits down across from Molly, staring into his cup, lets go of it and watches the subtle ripples on the surface. The table is shaking, ever so slightly, and he wonders if it had always done that or if something was wrong with it, something wrong with the ship. He figures it would tell them if it were. “It remembered me.”

“Mhm. Remembered me, too. And Jester,” Molly says.

“I thought it was dead.”

“Guess it didn’t agree.” Molly takes a swig, downs his drink in one gulp and coughs once after he swallows.

“That’s not coffee, is it?” Fjord asks and he gets a smirk first before an actual reply.

“Very astute.”

“Where’d you get it?” He doesn’t mention that he’s already seen Nott with a flask. He’s not sure why he even asks. Curious to see what Molly would say, maybe. (The beeping had started again at some point in the back of his head but it was slowly abating, stop-and-go before it finally just stops completely. He’s not sure if he should be concerned or if it meant the problem was solved. It certainly didn’t _feel_ like it was.)

“Well,” Molly says, wipes the rim off with the pad of his thumb, “Since you’ve embraced your captainship now, our relationship has changed. I’d be risking getting my fellow crewmate in trouble. And I’m no tattletale. If you find out on your own, well... I can't be blamed for that.”

“Our relationship doesn’t have to change,” Fjord tells him. Molly makes a face at him that sends a heat up the back of his neck. He slurps down his coffee just to give himself something to do.

“Speaking of dead things or, more accurately, _not_ dead things, we have a conversation that we still need to finish.”

“We do?”

“I believe we were talking about the fact that our corporate overlords asked you to kill the beast once we’ve finished tracking it down and not tell any of us about it until right before you pulled the trigger. Or possibly after,” Molly explains.

“Ah,” Fjord grunts. He’d completely forgotten—not about what he was expected to do but the conversation he had had with everyone else that had been interrupted by an alarm. It felt like weeks ago but it was only a few hours. The pain in his head gets more intense. He didn’t see how that was particularly fair; there was no meat in there, he shouldn’t have to _feel this_. ( _There’s no meat in there, there’s no meat in there, there’s no meat in there_ , sing-song, like a child taunting him, and he has to swallow a lump of dread that’s threatening to suffocate him.) Fjord props his elbow on the table and pushes his index and middle fingers against a spot just above his eyebrow, rubs it, but it doesn’t help. The caffeine isn’t doing much either. He keeps drinking it anyway. “I had some reservations at first, I admit. But after seeing what it did to that crew… I’m thinking maybe killing it is the right call. I do think it’s strange, though.” He’s musing out loud. “You’d think finding it would have been our first concern.”

“You would think, yes,” Molly says.

“I suppose, this far down, there’s little risk of it attacking anyone but us. But it could be anywhere.” It’s definitely not close enough for the ship to pick it up on its radar, unless it was pulling the same thing the little one had by standing just a few feet outside of the _Bathynomus_ ’ range which meant either it was overly cautious or there was some part of the massive creature that knew what it was dealing with.

“Nah, man. Have you been around wild animals?” Beau’s deep voice comes from the doorway, her, Jester, and Nott all walking in. “If they have a territory, they defend it. I mean, these L&N people know about ocean stuff, right? They’ve gotta figure that it probably hasn’t gone very far, despite what they told us. Difficult to track and all that bullshit. Maybe it’s licking its wounds. Or planning something.”

“That’s not very comforting,” Nott says, climbing up on one of the seats and Jester puts a mug down in front of her, busies herself with filling her own, dumping a ludicrous amount of sugar in it. Beau hops up on the counter, her legs swinging, heels going _thump thump thump_ against the bottom cabinet. “But you’re not wrong. It’s only a matter of _when_. I know what it’s like when bad things feels threatened. I’ve been waiting for it to attack since the second we got down here.” Nott laughs nervously at herself, reaches into her coat and pulls out her flask, which she dumps the contents of into her cup. A strip of light on the side of it turns from green to red once it’s empty, a progress bar already beginning to fill as she puts it back where it had come from. She shows no regard of being self-conscious about doing this in front of Fjord and he gives Molly a look which he hoped would speak volumes. He gets a small shrug in return.

“You know,” Beau says, “If we’re still talking about this whole ‘kill the thing because they told us to’ business, I’m for it. Not ‘cause they said so but, hey, that fucking thing is doing a lot worse than killing people. I mean, I’m kinda interested in what’s going on with it, where it came from, but I doubt it’ll listen if we say ‘hey, wait, before you try to knock us around like a punching bag, you think we could ask you some questions?’.”

“We’ve got that monster on the bottom floor,” Nott says. “Which I’m assuming we’re definitely _not_ telling L &N about.” She gulps down some of her drink. “Unless they already know.” She has some more, leans in slightly and lowers her voice as if she thought someone she isn’t talking to might be listening. “I’ve seen military vessels. They liked to fly low over the Goblin neighborhoods. As they should,” Nott tacks on but doesn’t expand on why. “And I’ve seen scientific ships, too. Because of Caleb. This isn’t a _science ship_.”

“But why would they send us down in a military ship? Beside the whole ‘killing the creature’ thing,” Jester asks.

“Because they know,” Nott whispers and Jester whispers back.

“They know what?”

“ _Everything_.”

“I think Nott’s right,” Fjord says and Nott looks to him, seems almost surprised. “In a way. I definitely think there’s… there are things they aren’t telling us. And there are things that we know that they know, too. But we need to be cautious if we’re going in that direction.”

“Because they might catch onto us,” Jester says.

“Because It’d be too easy to get lost in that sort of thinking and that’s when things start going off the rails,” Fjord corrects. “But that, too. Yes.”

“You sound like you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before,” Beau says. Fjord had been on a ship where the crew started to get overly curious, suspicious of the cargo they were shipping and the intentions of their employers. He’s heard the voice of someone getting the others riled up because _what if this stuff is dangerous?_ Radiation saturated materials. Grey-area-illegal products. _Bobby got a cough after moving crates around. What’s in there, huh? What if we’re being poisoned and they aren’t protecting us?_ Once you go over that edge, convince yourself—and others—that everything is a cover-up and a lie, there’s no going back, even if it turns out you were wrong.

“I know how people can get.”

“Okay. So,” Beau says, “We know for a fact that they’re tracking us.”

“That’s the only thing we know for sure.” That’s their only one-hundred percent. Over the next half hour, they go over everything else. At some point during their discussion, Jester brings out the marker she had used to draw on the tube, starts writing down what they’re saying, using the table as her stationary ( _that does come off, doesn’t it_? Fjord had asked. _Oh no way_ , Jester replied, _this is permanent_ ). The assumptions they feel comfortable making at this point, without concrete evidence to the contrary are this:

 

1\. The _Bathynomus_ is not a scientific vessel.

2\. L&N did not ask about the missing bodies of the _Johnsonii_ crew—they either hadn’t looked at the data from the _Grimpo_ that Fjord had sent (which meant the exercise was there purely to keep them busy) or they weren’t surprised by what was found. They _knew_ there wouldn’t be any bodies. The exploration was simply to confirm it.

3\. The amount of days they were given was arbitrary.

4\. The fact that they’re intent on exterminating the creature but in no rush to get it done likely meant that L&N knew _exactly_ where it was and had lied about not being able to locate its current whereabouts.

 

When they finish, Fjord reads over what Jester had scribbled. Everything they’d said about going off to find it, about it being difficult to find themselves— _this’ll all be explained to you in the briefing tomorrow_ , the man with the glasses had said when Fjord questioned being exactly where they were right now, believing the creature would still be here, and he doesn’t realize until right then that the explanation had never come; he’d been so caught up in the secrets he’d been asked to keep, the position he was given that he hadn’t asked for, the moving up of the schedule, that it hadn’t even crossed his mind. What else had they conveniently left out? _Stop_ , he tells himself, _you’re doing exactly what you told them not to_.

The only thing Fjord was certain that L&N _didn’t_ know was about him. And even then… Fjord kneads at his head again.

“Are you alright, Fjord?” Jester asks.

“Yeah. I’m fine. Nott,” Fjord says, grabs her attention away from staring into her cup, “Could you search the ship’s computer? The way you did when you were looking for the tracker.”

“Sure. What am I looking for now?”

“Anything. Everything. If it seems even _mildly_ suspicious…”

“Spyware. Malware.” Nott says. “Got it.” She _sounds_ drunk but her confidence has bolstered; if Caleb were here, Fjord would ask him if he was sure he should let her near the console in this state but he’s not. A strange expression falls along Nott’s face, as if she’s listening to something. She mutters a response, lifts her chin to address the others. “Caleb wants to talk to us about the creature.”

 

& & & &

 

Caleb meets them outside of the room with the hatch— _the Hatchery!_ Jester announces as they converge upon it, as if this was something she had been trying to come up with for days and only just now figured it out—and leaves the door open, neither him nor Yasha willing, it seemed, to leave the thing alone despite (so far) proving it was doubtful for it to make an escape.

“Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development,” he says as soon as they’re all standing in the same place. Nobody responds. Caleb sighs, closes his eyes and moves his right hand as if he’s hastily scrolling through words, sorting out the easiest and fastest way to explain this to them. “It is a theory that suggests that children… they go through four distinct stages of mental development. Sensi— Birth to two years, two to seven, seven to eleven, twelve and beyond that. Older. The first stage, sensorimotor, it is things like… like… understanding the world through movements. Sensations. Actions have consequences. Object permanence.” He rolls his fingers over each other, struggling to have it make sense, translating from his brain to his mouth. “Understanding that things continue to exist when they cannot see them.”

“Okay,” Beau says, “What’re you getting at? You think this thing is what? A kid?”

“Yes. I do not know what brain it’s using. One of the people from the _Johnsonii_ or it’s own but from what I have been able to observe since Fjord brought it on board. Yes,” he repeats. “A child. A very, very young child.”

“When I hid,” Fjord says, “It stopped having a tantrum. It couldn’t see me so it thought I was gone. That’s what you meant by ‘object permanence’.”

“So… That big creature is it’s… mother?” Nott asks.

“I mean, it did sort of _make it_ ,” Jester replies. “That’s like being its mother.”

“It’s got the development of a baby,” Fjord says, musing out loud, has to put his words out there because there’s no room for it in his head amongst all that _pain_. At least it was helping to keep a lid on the calmly boiling pot of anxiety in his stomach, distracting him from thinking about much of anything else. “It _is_ a baby. A walking, fighting baby.” Jester laughs at that. “Do you think it might… move on to the next stage at some point? Be able to communicate?”

“I— Do you know how long I would have to analyze this being before I could answer any of these questions? Weeks. _Months_. I’ve had less than twelve hours. What I’ve surmised is simply from… from _books_ I’ve read in my spare time. I am not a neuropsychologist. I study fish. I’m— I’m here as a marine biologist. What I _could_ try to tell you is why it’s not dead or how it can inhabit both the ocean and our ship but I can’t do that either because all I have is this”—Caleb sweeps an arm towards the table behind him—“And _that_ isn’t helpful. I need a sample. A piece of it. And I need a sophisticated scanner that’s _not_ from twenty years ago. And then _maybe_ I’d be able to figure out what this thing is.” He pauses in his diatribe to catch his breath and the others let him have an extra moment, a silence before one of them says anything but then he keeps going. “Why is the lab on this ship so useless?”

“Oh buddy,” Jester says, “Have I got a table for you.”

“What—?”

“I think in a roundabout way, Jester has the right idea,” Fjord tells him, spares a glance to Yasha. “You two could use a break.”

“I don’t believe it is wise to leave it alone,” Caleb protests.

“It’s been quite awhile since you’ve eaten,” Nott says to him. “Or slept. I don’t think one cup of coffee or one of Jester’s pastries would hurt. It’s not going anywhere. And you have your Thread.” Caleb’s expression clearly reads _please do not make me_ but Nott just keeps staring up at him, her mouth set in a no-nonsense line, brow furrowed, and, eventually, he sighs, his shoulders dropping slightly.

“Maybe you could leave Frumpkin down here as well,” Fjord suggests. “Would he know to come find you? If something goes hinky.”

“He would. I suppose… For a few minutes,” Caleb says, allows Nott to lead the way, Yasha following and Jester going to catch up with them, asking questions to which most of the answers were _I don’t know_ or _that would take a long time to explain_.

“I should go back to fucking with the drone,” Beau says, shuffles off next, leaves Molly and Fjord alone again for the third time that morning.

“Any big plans until the next crisis?” Molly asks.

“I think I need to lay down for a short while,” Fjord admits but doesn’t tell Molly why, just that he needed to, and Molly narrows his eyes for the briefest of moments, scrutinizing him, but then he nods, starts to saunter away ahead of Fjord. He freezes, though, when he hears his name. “Could you tell Jester… that scan she has of me. She should get rid of it. We don’t know if L&N could find it.”

“Scan?” Molly questions. “What scan? I have no idea what you’re talking about. There’re no scans of any of us on board.” ( _You and Jester go ahead_ , he’d said when they’d parted ways back at the cockpit, _there’s something I need to do_.) He keeps going, his tail the last thing to disappear up through the hole in the center of the ship.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord keeps the room dark. He closes his eyes, rests on his side, his back, his stomach, but nothing is working. There were so many times before that he’d yelled at his brain to _turn off_. _Turn off so I can sleep_. Now he says the same thing, but is painfully aware of how accurate the command is and how even more frustrating it is that it doesn’t work. His head shouldn’t _throb_ and yet it is—he knows he should tell someone (Jester at the very least) but he has no idea what they could do for him, remembers Jester admitting that neither she nor Nott could wake him when he passed out because they didn’t understand how he worked.

The only ones who likely did were the ones who had made him but Fjord was uncertain of the plausibility of them ever meeting in person again. The way they had presented themselves to him made it clear that he’d never seen their kind before; they definitely were not roaming around on Earth, living in apartments and holding down a steady job. They were somewhere _out there_. Fjord’s only options were to go find them himself or hope they decided to vacation somewhere exotic. _Come to Earth! We’ve got water saturated with salt, too many cities, not enough trees. Enjoy our pollution and come meet the man you involuntarily turned into a machine_.

He finally— _finally_ —feels his eyelids start to get heavy, that fuzzy, sluggish feeling of being on the very edge of falling asleep closing in on him when the ship shatters it, an alarm going off and pervading the small room with noise.

_Wheeum wheeum wheeum—_

It’s the same sound the ship had made when it found the creature now stored away in its belly and Fjord falters in his bed, braces for impact, assuming that the momma had finally realized that her child was missing or, maybe, it didn’t care about it and was finally just attacking for the hell of it but there’s nothing. Barely even a tremor (not one that hadn’t already been there).

He makes his way up to the cockpit, walks in to find Beau already there, taking over his seat, her hands moving around on the console but she turns when she hears footsteps amongst the racket.

“Oh, hey,” she says over the racket, “Molly said you were taking a nap.” Fjord lifts his good hand, gestures up towards the alarm. “Right. You, uh, know how to turn this shit off?” He motions for her to get up and then takes her place, rearranges a few windows, wipes a finger across the center screen and the ship falls silent once again. “What’s it say?”

  _FOREIGN BODY DETECTED_.

Fjord had claimed to have déjà vu before but he was certainly feeling it for real now. He brings up the radar, the topographical map the _Bathynomus_ was still in the process of making and there was a blip. An unknown, biological sign, not moving, about thirty feet away from their vessel. He turns on ship-wide communications, not in the mood to stand up and try to wrangle them all.

“Folks,” he says, “I think we’ve got something here.”

“You think it could, uh, could be the creature? The mom?” Beau asks. Fjord shakes his head, points to the map. There’s a very tiny black spot, right amongst what must be undersea rocks, where the scanners had found something that didn’t quite belong. “How small is it?”

“Small enough that I can’t believe that the ship even found it at all.”

“Maybe we should ignore it,” Yasha’s voice comes in over the speakers.

“But what if we could get it?” Nott asks. “Not that I’m volunteering. But it might help Caleb. It could be that sample that he needed.”

“That is not—” Caleb starts to say but Beau talks as if she hadn’t even heard him.

“I dunno, yeah,” She flicks her hand towards the screen, “It’s not that far, right? I just put on a suit, go out and scoop it up, bring it in.” Her scowl deepens when they hear Molly laughing. “What the fuck, dude.”

“Oh. Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I’m fuckin’ serious.”

Molly sighs. “It’s difficult to tell with you. Well then, let me lay out the _myriad_ of issues your plan has: how will you find it once you’re down there? How are you going to bring it in? And, of course, my favorite: how do you plan on leaving the ship?”

“Can’t she just go out the way Fjord came in before?” Jester asks.

“Molly is correct,” Caleb says. “I don’t believe it is that simple. The tube has a purpose. It regulates… Hm.” He trails off as if that meant something and he’d only just realized it by saying it out loud. He keeps speaking, but sounds preoccupied, similar to how he had when Fjord tried talking to him when he was writing himself notes while they were hiding behind the table. “It regulates pressure. So you don’t drop immediately from 14.7psi to 11,000 in a matter of seconds. The suits help, of course. But only so much.”

“So you’re saying that we can’t leave the ship? Ever?” Yasha asks.

“Not until we kick out our new houseguest and repair the tube,” Molly responds, adds as an off-side: “At least now we have nine people on board.”

“I could do it,” Fjord says and, after he does, there’s a drawn-out silence. Jester is the first one to speak.

“But your suit is ruined. None of the others would fit.”

“I don’t think that matters.” He could wear what was left of it at least, simply because what he was currently wearing was very much _not_ made for the sort of environment outside of the ship, but whether it covered him entirely or not was definitely no longer an issue. He hates knowing this about himself. He hates that he’s already figuring out ways other people could use it to their advantage. He hates that he _can_. He’s becoming more and more aware as the hours pass of why the ones who did this to him had kept it locked away in a box. (That damn myth. What the hell was it called? Why couldn’t he remember it?) His head is still pounding. He thinks he can hear the beeping again but before he can decide for sure, it’s gone. But, as Molly had told him, _there’s work to do_. “I can go. I’ll take one of Caleb’s lights with me. There’s bound to be something here that I could use to collect it, even if we have to make something.”

“We won’t be able to talk to you,” Jester says, assuming that he won’t be bothering with his helmet.

“Like Beau said: it’s not that far. I’ll have the light. You’ll be able to find me.”

“And what if something goes wrong?” Jester questions. “Who will go out and get you?”

“No one,” Fjord says. “I don’t expect _any_ of you to risk yourselves to come rescue me if, god forbid, something happens.” He glances pointedly at Beau but can’t do the same to others, puts a hard emphasis on his words instead and hopes it comes through clear.

“We’re talking like this is end of the world shit,” Beau says. “It’s just a piece of something hidden in a bunch of rocks and sand. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s thirty feet.”

“It was less than that when Jester went out there and look what happened,” Molly says.

“Caleb.” Fjord speaks over them, raises his voice to be heard over their bickering. He doesn’t respond. “ _Caleb_.”

“Mhm. Wha—? Yes. What is it?”

“Would it help?”

“Would what—?”

“A sample,” Fjord clarifies. “A smaller, more manageable sample of whatever this creature is or what it left behind. Would it help you figure this out?” Caleb says nothing for a moment.

“It would. But—”

“It would.”

“...It would,” Caleb repeats softly.

“Okay.” Even if this wasn’t useful in telling them what was going on under the surface with Lebedev-Narita, leading them down the path of _here’s what they haven’t been telling you and why_ , then at least this was something _meaningful_. This was a discovery. A major one. Fjord had always harbored an interest in science, in discovering things. Learning. ( _Watching, potential, learn, learn, l— l— lear—_ his mind is stuttering, the words they’d said to him skipping and that isn’t good, neither is the pain or the beeping but there’s no time. _We’ve got work to do_.) There were institutions he could have gone to but they wanted money he barely had enough of and the best one he needed an invitation for; he was never important enough to know the right people to get one. _Someday_ , he had told himself, _someday you’ll get there_. Maybe this was it.

And, at the end of the day, this was something to keep his mind off of everything, despite the fact the the one thing he wanted to forget was how he was capable of doing this for them in the first place.

“Okay. Alright,” he says again. “Take twenty. Let’s figure out how I’m gonna get this thing inside and how I’m gonna find my way to it in the first place.” Fjord stares at the map, the black spot. The radar. _Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Pi—_ _I rode my bicycle past your window last night._ He blinks. It hadn’t been loud, just barely there in the background but he’d heard it: a piece of a song. A woman singing. Fjord looks to Beau but she’s gone, checks the console next. The communication channel was still open. It was probably just Jester, singing to herself or maybe Frumpkin and he had picked it up.

Taking one last look at the map, he opens the buffers over the windows and then gets up and makes his way out to find his suit.

 

& & & &

 

“I think this is ridiculous,” Molly says, fixing and adjusting the front of Fjord’s suit. The damaged sleeve stops just above his elbow, the material perfectly rendered away, an almost burnt-like circle where his arm hadn’t made contact with the creature’s insides.

“Duly noted,” Fjord replies, staring down at him but then looking up when he hears footsteps, three figures making their approach down the short hallway. They’re back in the room where the drone—still in pieces on the rec room floor—used to sleep, the enormous hatch in the floor sealed shut, would remain that way until Fjord was the only one there. Jester is the first one through the door, empty-handed, and he doesn’t understand why she’s there. She walks up, starts checking over the same things that Molly had only just finished with seconds before she’d entered.

“Second Skin is not supposed to go in water.” Her gaze flickers up to his face, takes his bandaged hand in hers. “I will have to take it off.” Fjord feels his jaw clench and she notices. “It will come off anyway. The cast, too. I can put it all back on once you return.” He closes his eyes, squeezes them. It was easier when he didn’t have to see it. The arm she had made for him was obviously not his own skin—glaringly, laughably so—but it still hid it well enough that, if he wasn’t staring too hard at it, it didn’t matter. But if he wanted to do this, he had to see it, had to let himself (and the others) remember: _this is me now, this is what I am._ He nods.

“Nott, Caleb,” he says, averts his gaze to them. He’s surprised to see that they had showed as well but, maybe at this point, he should be more surprised that they aren’t _all_ down here. (He can feel Jester unwrapping him. He keeps his eyes facing forward.) “What’ve you got?” They move closer and Caleb has the dark red sphere that held his Dancing Lights held in both hands. He lifts it up slightly, looks down and away and, at first, Fjord thinks its nerves or uncomfortableness but then he sees that he’s watching Jester. He returns his attention to Fjord.

“I did a small test. Well. _Yasha_ helped me complete a small test. Some of the substance, on the inside of the sphere. It proved resistant. You can use it to collect the sample.” He makes a motion to give it to Fjord but pulls it back when he sees that he’s not ready yet to take it from him. “A light is inside. Just… You remember, I’m sure. And Nott has— She has done something quite clever with that itself.”

“The camera,” Nott says, “From the drone. It doesn’t really need it at the moment so I attached it to the light.”

“How is that going to help me?” Fjord asks. It would help _them_ because they could keep visual track of him but it wouldn’t do either of them any good outside of that.

“There’s a little red light on it. On when it’s recording, off when it’s not. We’ll use _that_ to tell you if you’re heading in the right direction. One flash if you’re going the wrong way and two if you’re close.”

“Three if we want you to come back,” Caleb adds. “And this—” He gives the sphere to Nott and then lays his right hand palm up, curls the other into what appeared to be a thumbs up and rests it on his open palm, brings both hands towards his chest. “Means ‘help me’.” They, too, are talking as if they don’t expect him to go out while wearing the helmet. They just _assumed_.

“Do it again,” Fjord says and Caleb does. He nods. _Got it_. “This is an awful lot for me just going thirty feet away.”

“There we go,” Jester says and Fjord swallows, finally looks down. The metal is still as white as he remembers and he feels a tension in his shoulders. He turns it, bends and unbends his thin fingers, the segments replacing bone but still somehow looking enough like it to make his stomach churn. Fjord can feel the others watching him, hears Caleb mutter something to himself. They’d all seen it already but this was the first time any of them had seen it in motion. He breathes out a slow exhale, takes the sphere from Nott and they back away, just to the door. “Fjord.” She waits for Fjord to look at her and she lowers her voice as she speaks, pretends to be _just making sure_ with his arm. “How long has your head hurt?”

“My head?” Dismiss it. Play it stupid. She cares, she obviously does, but it’s who he is. He can’t help it.

“Fjord.” His name said like: _don’t bullshit me here_.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. That gets a small smile. “Not long.”

“You would tell me if it was really bad, right?”

“Sure,” Fjord assures her. Except it _was_ really bad and he had no intention of telling her so. It was bad enough that, if he wasn’t _what he was_ , he’d imagine he likely would have trouble seeing straight.

“You should put on the helmet,” Molly says. If he overheard their conversation, he makes no mention of it. “It might help.”

“I don’t need it.”

“I must give you credit: you’ve embraced this shiner, fancier new you a lot faster than I expected,” Molly says.

“I haven’t,” Fjord admits. “But we’ve got work to do, right?” An indecipherable expression passes over Molly’s face but that’s it. “Alright everyone. Clear it out.” He turns his back on them, looks towards the sealed hatch in the floor, listens to their footsteps as they retreat. He stares and stares but it doesn’t open and he hears that soft beeping in the back of his head again. It sounds like a warning. Maybe it had always been there but the noise of day-to-day life had drowned it out. Down here, though, where it was almost _too quiet_ … Or it was new. It was new and something was wrong, _had been wrong_ , but there was no helpful message attached to tell him what it was.

_I rode my— my bicycle past your window last night. I roller skated to your door at d-d-d-daylight. It almost seems like you're—_

“You don’t have to do this.” Molly’s voice, louder than the music, and Fjord jumps, just a bit. He thought he’d told them to clear out.

“It’s fine,” Fjord says. And then, when a helmet appears, is pulled down over his head, secured tightly: “What the—?”

“Wear the helmet,” Molly says. “You’ve got ten minutes and then I’m coming after you.”

“I told you not to do that.”

“Did you? I thought you were talking to everyone _but_ me.” He shrugs. “My mistake. But I have a terrible reputation with memory so I’ll probably forget.” Molly reaches out, goes for Fjord’s exposed arm, touches that one specifically. “Don’t get lost.” He leaves. All that’s left is for the bottom to open up and swallow Fjord whole.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord releases the light as soon as he drops into the ocean, watches it dance around him, revolving around his head in a wide arc before stopping half a foot in front of him. He moves his right hand through the water but, whatever some part of him is expecting to observe, he doesn’t find it. His vision and the glow from the Dancing Light is more than enough for him to get a basic idea of where he is, what’s surrounding him. He looks up, stares at the nothingness stretching on seemingly forever above him. He’d only done a space-walk once in his entire life. When he gone back inside, the woman who had helped him get into his suit had asked how it was, what it felt like.

“I’ve never done it before,” she had said, “But I always ask everyone how it feels after their first time.”

“I didn’t think it was possible to feel that insignificant,” Fjord had replied. He thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a moment that could never be replicated and yet, here he is, that same sort of unbelievable _smallness_ opening like a pit in his stomach. Except this time, someone’s extinguished the stars.

There’s a pinging in his helmet. Someone trying to contact him.

“Is the camera working?” Nott asks as soon as she’s aware that he’s listening. Attached to the luminous ball (a ball of energy with an eye, swaying, back and forth, tendrils fluctuating; _I am one who made you_ ) is a tiny rectangular box of a camera. “Here.” The red light pops on and then off. To him it looks grey. Still: it’s conspicuous enough. “I see you.”

“Then it’s working,” Fjord responds.

“Okay,” Beau says. “It’s on the left wall. We’ve got you on the, uh, radar thingy. And we’ve got the map open. So just start swimming down and we’ll tell you when you’ve gone far enough. Good?”

“Yeah.” He does as she said: he swims.

“Stop!” Beau commands after about a minute or so of movement. He halts his momentum by drifting to the left towards the trench wall, uses it to steady himself, hand pressed flat against it. “Alright. So just a little bit forward.”

“‘A little bit’? What’s ‘a little bit’?”

“You know. A little. Just… a little bit,” Beau says, unhelpful. He moves what he thinks is _a little bit_ , hears her make a noise that definitely meant _you went too far_.

“Maybe I should turn you off. Stick to Nott’s idea with the light.”

“It’ll take longer,” she says.

“Yeah, but I won’t have you making those noises in my ear because we have very different definitions of ‘a little bit’. If it doesn’t work, I can get you ba—back on the horn.” There’s a brief hush from the other end of the line. He’d stuttered outside of his head, just on the one word, and he can’t tell if the quiet was because they noticed or if Beau was deciding whether or not she was okay with this. The truth was that it didn’t matter if she was, he could turn her off anyway, but that wasn’t exactly fair. “Molly gave me a very strict deadline. I need to get moving.”

“Fine. We’ll do it the hard way.” She disconnects before he could and the light on the camera flashes once. He backs up slightly. _Flash flash_. So far so good.

It carries on like this for awhile. A flash when he’s not there, two when he’s closer until, eventually, the light starts flashing once, twice, three, four, five— He takes that as a good sign, turns his communications back on.

“I guess I found it,” he says, turns to face the wall, starts running his hand over the surface. Fjord doesn’t see it at first but then there, in a small alcove carved in the rock either by the creature itself or the passage of time, is a blob of lumped skin, no bigger than his— Well. His _old_ ring finger. The light moves nearer to his head and, before he gently nudges the object into the waiting, empty sphere, he turns the camera towards it so the others could see it, too.

“Bezoar,” he hears Caleb say.

“I’m sorry, a what?”

“They’re quite disgusting,” Caleb says, begins explaining what it is while Fjord reaches into the cave, tapping with his unprotected metal hand at the mass, rolling it forward and catching it in the container. He secures it inside just as Caleb starts to peter out, finishing with: “That’s what I’ve read, at least.”

“I’m turning you guys off again. I don’t need your chatter to find my way back.” He severs the line and, at the exact same time that he twists around to face the ship, the exterior lights come on nearly full blast—not dimmed from the last time he’d had them active hours ago—blinding him. He freezes.

 _I ro— rode my bicycle past your window— window— window last night. I roller sk-skated to your door at d-d-d-daylight. It almost s-s-seems like you're avoid— avoid— avoiding m-me. I'm okay alone but you've got something I nee—e—e—eed._ _Well, I've got a br_ _— br_ _and new pair of roller skates, you've got a brand new key_ _— key— k-k-key_ _._ _I think that we should get together and tr— tr— tr— try them on to see. I've been looking around awhi— awhi— awhile, you've got something for—_

He can’t see anything. He’s in the void.

“Complication,” a familiar low hum, a deep voice speaking to him. Fjord tries to reply and he finds, to his surprise, that he can. But not easily. His accent has vanished again.

“Wh— What— What— What do you mean?”

“Unknown.”

“Can— Can you fix— Can you do something?”

“Not here.” They’re there but they’re not _really there_. But then: “Try.” His vision goes black and then white. He feels a sharp pain up his spine, into the back of his head, his head that still aches, throbbing. It rises into a crescendo and then… it stops. The pain is gone. “Blocked.”

“I still remember what I am,” Fjord says, is aware of how he sounds. Not a statement of fact. _I still remember. Why couldn’t you have taken that away?_

“Yes,” the voice says.

“What did you block?”

“Blocked,” it merely repeats. Telling him, Fjord supposes, would defeat the purpose. He certainly can’t remember what’s missing.

“That song,” Fjord says, is aware that he was meant to be doing something else, supposed to _be somewhere else_ but he’s here in the vacuum and outside of that is exactly the same (nothing at all). “Where did that come from?”

“Not us,” the voice says and then Fjord blinks and he’s back in the ocean, floating, the lights on the ship now absent.

“—Sorry, man,” Beau is saying. He’d turned them off, hadn’t he? But there she was, in his ear. He’d switched it back on without knowing, or the energy had been responsible. “Dude, you okay? I didn’t fuckin’ blind you, did I?” He’d been in there, in the _nothing_ for a minute at least, maybe longer, but out here only a couple seconds seemed to have passed. “Fjord.”

“I’m here. I’m fine,” he says. “I just got startled. I’m comin’ in.”

“With thirty seconds to spare,” Molly says. Fjord makes his way back to the _Bathynomus_ , the Dancing Light by his head, the sphere tucked under his arm and all he can think of is what the voice had told him:

 _Not us_.

Then who the hell did it belong to?

 

& & & &

 

The reprieve, Fjord discovers, is only temporary, although the memory that they had blocked was still missing and they’d done a goddamn number on him this time because the only thing he’s left with is the vague and uneasy feeling that _something_ was unaccounted for but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was. The headache, though. The headache comes back.

Caleb had been waiting for him—for _what he had_ —when Fjord came back. He’d taken the sphere carefully, walked away with it as if he thought it might explode. Jester and Molly had been there, too and she’d immediately started to lead him to the medical room after he’d peeled off the suit to rewrap his hand but he’d stopped just outside the doorway. He thought that maybe now that he knew, now that the others did as well, the anxiety might have dissipated, the deterrent against exposure no longer needed—the thing it was protecting him from already happened—but it was still there. Jester had reassured him, said she could do it out there, told him to hang on. She’d gone inside to collect her materials, left him and Molly alone in the hallway.

He didn’t know why he was still there. Lingering. _What_ , he had asked. _Nothing_ , Molly had replied.

It had been two hours since he’d given Caleb the sample and Fjord was now sitting in his chair, staring down at the console. An updated scan of the trench was quietly running, sweeping the cavernous area and the black spot where (what Caleb had called) the ‘bezoar’ used to be is now absent. The old data was a separate file underneath but, if he were lucky, they would only ask for the most recent one. Or they wouldn’t ask for it at all, a simple _did you find anything noteworthy_ offered to him instead, although Fjord doubted they would take him at face value with something like this.

He grinds the bottom part of his palm over his eyebrow but it does nothing.

There was something he wanted one of them do to, something he’d asked one of the others to do.

“Nott,” he says on the open channel.

“Yes?”

“That thing we discussed. Do you have a chance to get that started?” There’s a couple seconds of silence.

“Sure.” She shows up a few minutes later and he relinquishes his seat to her but doesn’t leave. “Oh. You’re staying?”

“I won’t get in the way.” Nott looks wary, seems uncomfortable, but she turns and faces the screens anyway, starts moving long fingers rapidly, bringing up windows that Fjord had never seen before, typing in strings of numbers and letters. She makes noises at it while she works and he doesn’t really need to be there, he could check on Caleb or Beau—who was still tinkering with the drone—or try to sleep again. There were options. But here he was.

_I rode my bicycle past your window last night. I roller skated to your door at daylight. It almost seems like you're avoiding—_

“Do you hear that?” Fjord asks. Just like when he was in here before, it’s distant, like someone playing it from another room and it’s filtering in. He’d thought it was Jester at first and then someone playing music from a device, leaking over the speakers in his helmet but none of the communication channels were open this time, not unless Nott accidentally turned it on.

“Hear what?” Nott responds.

_...Well, I've got a brand new pair of roller skates, you've got a brand new key. I think that we should get together and try them on to see. I've been looking around awhile, you've got something for me..._

He closes his eyes, inhales and holds his breath a moment before letting it go.

“Are you alright?” Nott asks.

“I… uh…” The music stops. He opens his eyes. “Yeah.” Nott is staring at him, eyes narrowed. She nods and then slowly gets back to work. “I’ll leave you to it.”

 

& & & &

 

He stands outside the medical room and stares into it. Jester isn’t there and he’s contemplating whether or not to go in, try to work the machines himself, if that would make a difference or if he should just leave and chalk it up to a sign that he shouldn’t go poking around in his head but then he hears the _clunk clunk_ of someone coming down the ladder and Jester asking: “Fjord?”

“Jester.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Waiting for you,” he says, clears his throat awkwardly with the way Jester grins at him but then it fades as she steps closer, as if she sees something on his face.

“What is it?” Even if he _did_ have her look, what was the point? What could she do? He needed a technician, not a doctor. He doesn’t even understand how he could feel pain at all, let alone how someone would go about attempting to treat it. Drugs don’t work on metal and wires.

“What do you think about all of this?” He asks instead. Jester frowns.

“I think I am glad to just be a part of this,” she says. “And I think that maybe if Caleb is right about that creature being a baby then its mom is going to be pretty angry and come looking for it. And then we’ll be in serious trouble. My mother always said that if I went missing, she would tear up the entire city to try and find me and I believed her.”

“Do you think we should let it go?”

“Caleb got his sample. And it’s not really hurting anyone. It could be hungry. Do we even know what it eats?” She asks. A lull. “Are you sure you’re okay? You can tell me. I can keep a secret.” She’s looking up at him so earnestly, so sincere in her question.

“It’s—” _I asked your m-mother if you were at ho— ho— home, she said yes, but you weren't— weren’t alone. Sometimes I think that you're avoiding me. I'm okay alone but you've got—_ The music is louder down here. It’s starting to stutter again but he doesn’t know if it’s the song itself or him.

“It’s what? What’s the matter, Fjord?” He doesn’t answer. It had been the loudest when he was in the room where the drone used to be, but the only other area of note down there was— He starts walking towards the ladder, Jester pursuing him. The song skips, starts over.

_I rode my b-b-bicycle past your wind —ow —ow last night. I roll— roll— roll— roller skated to your door at daylight. It alm-m-m-most seems like you're avoiding me. I'm okay alone— alone but you've got something I need..._

It’s as if an invisible hand is slowly turning up the volume.

_...Well, I've got a brand— brand new p-p-pair of roller skates, you've got a brand new k-k-k-key. I think that we should get to— to— together and tr— try them on to see..._

When he walks into the Hatchery, it’s on full blast, he can barely hear Jester still trying to ask him what in the world was going on. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Yasha by the back wall but, when they walk in, she straightens, uncrosses her arms. He puts all of his attention on the creature which had noticed him, started scrabbling against the tube.

_...I've been look— looking a-a-a-a-around awhile, you've got something —thing —thing for me. Oh, I've got a brand— brand new pair of roll— roll— roller skates…_

He walks closer, just a few steps, knows that he’s passed through Caleb’s Silver Thread.

“It’s you,” he says. “Isn’t it? Why can I—? How’re you doing that?”

_...You've got a brand new key._

Just as abruptly as it had started, it stops and the silence is almost as deafening as the noise had been, even with the sound of the creature having a tantrum against it’s transparent prison.

“Fjord,” Jester says. “Fjord. What is it? What is it doing?”

“I hear— I’ve been hearing music,” he finally divulges. “And it got louder when I came down here. I think… I think the creature’s doing it.”

“It’s _talking_ to you?”

“I don’t know.” He rubs absently at his head. “It stopped after I spoke to it.”

“Okay,” Jester says.

“Jester…”

“I believe you,” she clarifies and he looks at her, tries to decide if she’s simply humoring someone she thinks has lost it because she’s worried about what he would do if she questioned him or if she really does mean it. She looks genuine. “What song is it?”

“I’ve never heard it before.” He touches his forehead again.

“Does it still hurt?” _BANG._ The creature gives the tube one single hard _slam_ with the largest fist it had and the material starts to crack. With remarkable speed, Yasha is away from the wall, her massive gun in her hands, pointing it directly at the creature. _BANG_. Another crack. She walks forward, clears the table of all of Caleb’s equipment so there’s nothing blocking her view, nothing between _her_ and _it_ except for this piece of furniture.

“Get behind me,” she says, her voice not losing the calm, subdued quality she always carried and then crouches down, rests the barrel on the surface of the table, adjusts it against her shoulder. They do as she says, hunkering down. There’s movement to his right and Fjord glances over to see the door slide open, watches as Caleb observes what’s happening and then promptly closes it again without a word.

“Say something, Fjord!” Jester whispers. _BANG_.

“I don’t think it—” _BANG_. “Hey— Hey now.” He rises up slightly on his heels. “I hear you. If you can just try to tell me what you want, maybe we can sort this out peacefully.” The fist goes to hit again but then comes to a standstill.

“It’s working.” But Jester speaks too soon. _BANG._

“You two need to leave,” Yasha says. “On three, we go to the door.” A breath in, four seconds pass until she lets it out. “One, two—” As a last resort, Fjord starts to loudly hum the song. The blows cease. None of them move.

“I know that song,” Jester says. “It’s a Human song. I’ve heard it on the oldies station. I like it!” She joins in with him, sings the actual words. “I’ve got a brand new pair of roller skates, you’ve got a brand new key…” The creature presses the palms of all three hands against the tube.

“We’re still leaving,” Yasha says, starts her count over and, at _one_ , they all simultaneously stand, start walking backwards. Fjord had trailed off once Jester had started and she continues, missing a few words, getting others wrong, but, nonetheless, it seems to work. When they reach the door, Fjord doesn’t miss the fact that the light on the panel was red instead of green. _Locked._ He swipes a finger across it. The colors change.

They carefully, carefully exit and Yasha doesn’t lower her weapon until the door is closed and sealed up tight. Caleb is pressed up against a wall and he and Fjord make eye contact, just long enough for Caleb to know that what he’d done hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“Force of habit?” Fjord asks, gives Caleb an out. He tilts his head slightly, lips thinning before he heaves out a nervous chuckle.

“Yes. Of course.”

“Now what?” Jester asks. It was a good fucking question.

 

& & & &

 

“We don’t know what’s in there,” Nott is saying. They’d all gathered in the kitchen again, since their other meeting place was still a mess of drone pieces, wires and tools. (Fjord had asked Beau about her progress and she’d lifted a shoulder in response. _I’m doing what I can_ , she said, _But don’t get your hopes up. I think the Grimpo is fucked_.) “Who knows what sort of junk might be mushed inside it. Maybe there’s a radio.” In any other circumstance, Fjord would have thought that suggestion was absurd but—considering how things have progressed in a only a little more than a day—it seemed like a valid theory. He’d told them about the music but not the headaches and definitely not about speaking to the energy while he was floating in the ocean. It’s unlikely that Jester doesn’t notice that he leaves something out but she doesn’t say anything about it, even though she could have. “You can probably hear it because of what you are.”

“Because of what I am,” Fjord echoes. But he knows she’s not wrong. “But then why not come in through the rest of the ship? There’re computers everywhere.”

“It could have just sent off a signal, pinged the first machine it could find,” Nott says. “Weird how it chose the most advanced one, though.”

“That almost sounded like a complement,” Molly says.

“It’s just a fact. It _has_ to be. It’d be stupid if we opened him up and found a KUTHA,” Nott says, as if that meant something to any of them. Caleb asks Fjord a couple of questions— _when did it start, what were you doing_ —and nods slowly, mulling it over but he doesn’t verbalize whatever conclusions he may have come to.

“This is fascinating,” Beau says, “But are we gonna talk about the fact that that thing is probably a few punches away now from getting out? We’ve got no idea if the rest of that room can hold up to the gunk it’s covered in. Maybe we should kick it loose.”

“The sour lemon has a point,” Molly says. “I guarantee that thing will kill us all the _second_ it has a chance. It’s a bug trapped under a glass. All we need to do is pull the paper.”

“I, for one, would feel much more comfortable not having it on board any longer. For both my own and Fjord’s safety,” Caleb puts forth, glances at Fjord. “Messing with someone’s brain…” He trails off, looks away. “I’ve gotten what I can from it. If we bring it back to the _Johnsonii_ , I doubt that it would stray.”

“Explaining wh— why we’re doubling back is going to be a chore,” Fjord says. He hears it but he’s not sure if the others do. He’d done it before, hopes they believe it’s just a nervous tic that he’d managed to hide from them until now. _He_ wants to believe that even though he’s very conscious of the fact that it’s not true.

“I know you told me not to mess with the tracker,” Nott says, “But I can. I can trick L&N into thinking that we’re still in the trench. If we go back, they won’t have to know. We could go wherever we want.”

“If it doesn’t work and they find out what you did—” Fjord starts to say but Beau makes a dismissive noise.

“What’re they gonna do? Fire us? Then this whole thing will be someone else’s problem. Sounds like a win-win to me.” They’re all staring at him. Waiting.

“Jester,” Fjord says, “Yasha. W-what do think?”

“You know what I think,” Jester replies. He does. They talked about it already, albeit briefly.

“Right.”

“We should kill it,” Yasha says, “Not let it go.” Her comment is met with an awkward silence.

“The last time we tried that, it didn’t exactly work,” Nott points out.

“Maybe we just didn’t try hard enough,” Yasha says, adjusts her stance when Molly responds.

“Fjord and I shot it quite a few times.”

“Wrong kind of ammo,” she suggests. “Not powerful enough.”

“But… why?” Jester asks.

“It’s a monster,” she tells Jester, matter-of-fact, like she didn’t understand why that was such a difficult concept for her—for _any_ of them—to grasp. “You say there are people in there. But I just see— It’s dangerous. It’s a threat to you and to Fjord and this ship. And that is why I’m here. To get rid of threats.” This is the most she’s said at once the entire time she’s been with them (as far as Fjord is aware) and they all know that she’s right, even though—as Fjord looks to each of them—none of them were about to admit it out loud. “I will let it out. I will put it down. We can still drop it off where we found it, if you’d like.” For the second time in a matter of minutes, all eyes are on Fjord.

“A-alright.” Another stutter. It wasn’t just his thoughts: it was leaking out again, just like the first time. C— Ca—” He takes in a steadying breath. There’s no way the rest of the crew could ignore this now. “Caleb. Do you have as much as you can get from this thing?”

“With what I have,” Caleb answers slowly and Fjord doesn’t miss the glimpse he spares Jester’s profile but he doesn’t know what it’s for. “Yes. I suppose.”

“This is— This—” Fjord sighs. Maybe if he continues to bury his head in the sand with regards to his verbal glitches, they’ll go away. It hasn’t worked with his headache, but this is different. This is not _that_. The others, unfortunately, won’t let him.

“You alright?” Beau asks. _Well, I've got a brand new p-p-pair of roller sk-sk-sk-skates, you’ve got a brand new key— key— key—_

“It’s the music again,” Fjord says, closes his eyes, gives his head a shake. “It’s tr-tr-tr- _trying_ to say some— something.” It has to be. That _has_ to be it. It wants to talk. Nott was right, it swallowed a radio and it’s using it because that’s all it has, that _song_ is all it has, but it doesn’t make sense. He can’t _think straight_. His own voice in his head is misfiring, too, just a heck of a lot worse. (It’s getting worse faster than he expected. _It’s getting worse_.)

— _I've been look_ _— look— look_ _ing around awhile, you've_ _— you’ve_ _got something for me_ _—_

He stands up but he’s not sure why, doesn’t know where he plans on going or what he’s thinking of doing except, as soon as he does, he only manages one single step before his entire body falters, his right leg not catching up with his left. There’s a blue hand on his elbow and he hears Beau say _Yasha_ and Yasha responds with _okay_ and walks out, gun in hand, saying nothing more.

They think the creature is doing this to him and Fjord feels like he should probably think that too, but for some reason he’s entirely unconvinced.

“H-hang on,” he says, shouts in his head at his legs and they start moving but Yasha is already gone by the time he makes it out of the kitchen, hears her heavy boots hitting the floor three levels below them, must have jumped the length of it or, maybe, slid down the ladder without using the rungs. _A woman on a mission_ , someone had once told Fjord a long time ago, _cannot be stopped_.

“It’s okay, Fjord,” Jester is saying. He’d been planning on saying that he _didn’t know_ what he wanted. Killing it seemed cruel, senseless, but what it was made of deserved a mercy it seemed nobody else but the people on this ship would be able to give them. But he needed _time_. He need to look at it once more, to really figure out what the message was—if there even was one at all—but Yasha was going to make sure that didn’t happen. He knows he should be angry but he’s too preoccupied with _can’t th-think, what— what— is happening to me_.

They all follow eventually, practically kicking each other in the head in their rush to climb down the ladder. The door to the Hatchery is shut and they stand out in the hallway, waiting, huddled together in a group. There’s the faint noise of a scuffle, a voice that must have been Yasha saying something but it’s unintelligible. One, two, three seconds of quiet and then the muffled _whumph_ of a plasma rifle being fired. More quiet. And then the door opens.

Yasha stands in the doorway, the light spilling out around her, her gun slung over his shoulder. She seems completely unharmed, not even out of breath and, just barely perceptible, Fjord hears Beau mutter _that’s fuckin’ hot_.

“It’s done,” Yasha says. Beau approaches and Yasha steps aside, allows her to look. They listen to Beau let out a low whistle.

“Sick.”

“Ooh. Let me see,” Jester says, comes up to join her, crowding the doorway that Yasha just abandoned. “Whoa. Yasha shot it in _half_. There’s body parts _everywhere_. It’s super gross! Nott, come look.”

“No thank you,” Nott says. Caleb hasn’t even seen it but, by description alone, he’s looking a little green.

“They’re not _everywhere_ ,” Beau says but then makes a face, moves her head side-to-side. “Okay. Maybe they’re a little bit everywhere.” A pause. “But hey. Nott was right. There’s a radio. Hm. There’re only two heads. Uh. Fo— No. Five arms. Guess the other two were trapped inside. Two legs. There’s a lot missing.”

“Maybe they dissolved or something,” Jester says.

“Excuse me,” Caleb says and hastily makes a retreat.

“How are you feeling?” Molly asks Fjord from where he’s standing at his side and Fjord wants to force out a normal sentence, a clear one without any hiccups because he _wants_ that to have been the solution even though he never believed that it would be. Kill the monster, fix the problem. Isn’t that how it was always supposed to work?

“I’ve— I’ve b-been be— bet—” He pauses. “I’ve been better.”

“Folks,” Molly says, calls out for their attention and Fjord wishes he wouldn’t but it’s too late. “It didn’t work.”

“Maybe it takes a minute,” Nott suggests. “Sometimes updates take awhile.” _Updates_.

“No. I don’t think— I don’t think,” Fjord says. He doesn’t think.

“This is bad,” Jester says, coming over to him, “This is really bad.”

“That’s quite the understatement,” Molly tells her.

“I know you hate it, but I _really_ think I need to give you another scan. I promise I’ll delete it as soon as I’m done… A little while after I’m done,” Jester revises.

He must be desperate because Fjord hears himself say: “Alright.”

 

& & & &

 

Jester paces.

“That’s not helping,” Fjord says from where he’s lying on the table, the basic Med Scanner brought down from the ceiling and hovering over him, whirring softly as it worked.

“Sorry,” Jester says. She stops. “Don’t talk.” The others—minus Caleb, who had vanished to parts unknown on the ship after hearing about the body—were all there, too, except Molly was the only one besides Jester who had actually come into the room. “It’s almost done.”

“Aren’t these things supposed to take, like, ten seconds or something?” Beau asks from out in the hallway.

“The really fancy ones,” Jester says, implying that this was, in fact, not one of those. “Don’t move.” He hadn’t even realized he was but, when he flicks his eyes down, he sees that his finger was tapping against the table, right by his leg.

“You want to know something about me, free of charge?” Molly asks, clearly attempting to distract him. “I’m here because the guy who was supposed to be here got arrested for something he didn’t do literally _minutes_ after he accepted this job. The only reason I’m on board is because he asked me to and I owed him.”

“Who is he? What did he do?” Nott questions.

“I’ll only answer one of those,” Molly replies, “Choose wisely.”

“Uh. The first one.”

“Gustav Fletching. Academic. Lecturer. Honestly, quite the showman. I’m here to take notes for his research but I’ll be damned if I know what I’m supposed to be taking notes _on_. He didn't have time to tell me. I think he just wanted to make sure I wasn’t in the picture for awhile,” Molly explains and they hear Yasha make a small huff of a noise where she’s standing behind Beau.

“Gustav. I know him. I ran security for one of his tours.”

“ _That’s_ where I know you from,” Molly says, “I thought I recognized you.” He laughs. “Small fuckin’ world.”

“Here we go! All done. Let’s see here…” The scanner goes back to where it had come from and Jester turns to the same mounted tablet that had his scan from a few hours ago displayed on the screen. Her face is obscured and, after he sits up slightly, all he can see is hair and horns. “I’m not— Oh.” She grabs the sides of the device and, instead of simply enhancing the image, she pulls it closer to her face. “That’s not supposed to be there.” She peers around the edge of it, stares at Fjord, and then swivels the screen towards him.

The same diagram that he’d seen of himself before is stretched out before him—all the sharp lines and square angles of metal underneath his artificial skin, below the armored shell—and he still feels _not good_ about seeing it (the rest of them, he realizes, are seeing it for the first time and he wants to hide it because—even though they’ve seen his hand, even though they _know what he is_ —he doesn’t want them to _see him_ that way). It looks nearly identical from the neck down but there, in his head, is an anomaly.

It’s highlighted bright red on the display, a small mass of _something_ sitting on the left side of the surprisingly brain-shaped computer currently packed away in his skull.

 _FOREIGN MATTER DETECTED_.

“Wh— W-w-wh— What is that?” Fjord stutters.

“I don’t know,” Jester says. “It’s not telling me anything else.”

“Holy shit, dude,” Beau comments, taking a few steps in. “I mean, it’s not a tumor right? Where would it come from? Robots don’t get spontaneous cancer.” A pause. “Do they?”

“Do you remember when your headaches started? Maybe they’re connected,” Jester queries and Fjord tries to think. It had been a few hours after he’d come back from leaving the ship without his helmet, the confrontation with the creature. If he hadn’t read what he read, saw that _thing_ , then he’d assume that maybe the deep sea pressure had fucked with him, some water got in and fried something important. Maybe—

Caleb’s voice breaks Fjord’s concentration and the man comes into view, Beau and Yasha parting to make space for him in the doorway. Nott must have called him here. He takes in the fact that everyone else was here, Fjord sitting on the table, the display, and then walks briskly into the room, grabs the tablet in the same manner that Jester did, leaning in to study it. “I see.”

He takes out the device he’d used on the _Johnsonii_ and, most likely, on the creature still in pieces on the Hatchery floor and turns to Fjord, lifts it but then hesitates.

“If that’s alright?” He asks. Fjord nods once. It beeps and hums as Caleb moves it around Fjord’s head, and Fjord feels his fingers start to tap again. After a minute, Caleb takes the device away, stares at a small screen in the front, moves his index finger along it as he reads, his mouth pulling into a frown. “Ah.” He looks up at Fjord but shows the readout to Jester first instead.

“Okay,” Jester says to Fjord, “I don’t want you to panic, but this says that there is alien DNA in your head.”

For a long moment, nobody says anything.

“In his fuckin’ _head?_ ” Beau blurts out. “Shit.”

The only time he had come into contact with it had been— He gets a flash of punching it, his arm sinking inside, of dragging it with him back to the ship and he lifts his wrapped hand, clenches it into a fist.

“Wh— What can y-y- we do?” Fjord asks.

“I don’t know! Even if you were all… meaty in there, we don’t have anything here for that kind of surgery,” Jester says. “I have no idea how to open you up and, if I could, I can’t start messing around with what’s in there—” She points at the screen, at the scan of his body. “Nott would have to do it and what if she screws up?”

“Hey,” Nott protests.

“I’m sure you’re _really good_ , Nott but I mean. Come on.”

“Well, it can’t _stay_ in his brain,” Beau says. “I mean, he’s already pretty effed up. How much worse is it gonna get if we just let that thing live in there?”

“I think maybe we should tell them,” Jester suggests. Tell _them_. She doesn’t specify _who_ she wants them to tell but she doesn’t need to.

“I don’t— I don’t know if that’s—” Fjord says. Even if they left out the part about him being what he is, they’d find out eventually anyway when they brought the _Bathynomus_ back up to the surface, wheeled him into some hospital and started opening him up. Fjord would like to think they would just help him, not ask any questions, allow him to go home but there’s no way to know that with one-hundred percent certainty. They could just as easily keep him somewhere, interrogate him for days or maybe weeks. They might take him apart.

“They would be better equipped to deal with this issue,” Caleb says.

“Better equipped to make him fuckin’ disappear,” Beau argues. “These guys may be all about the ocean and shit but they’re still a _company_ and companies are only ever in anything for themselves. To protect their own asses.”

“The more money they have, the less scruples,” Molly says.

“The more money, the better the equipment,” Jester counters.

“Can’t you just… treat it like a tumor?” Nott asks. “They have non-invasive things for that, don’t they?”

“Yes,” Jester says. She’s sounding more and more agitated, as if she doesn’t understand why _they_ don’t understand her limitations, same as Yasha not getting why she thought they had a problem with her killing the creature. “But not with _any of this_. It is a _stupid_ basic scanner and first aid! What can I do with that? Nothing.”

“Th— That’s enough,” Fjord says. He swings his legs over the edge of the table, rubs a hand on his forehead, feels a heavy exhale escape through his mouth. They weren’t going to solve anything by arguing about it—it’s an argument that would likely continue to go in circles and circles for hours as one side pulled, the other pushed. He doesn’t _want_ this in his brain any more than the others want it to be there either, but the thought of anyone outside of this ship discovering the truth about him sends a roiling anxiety to his stomach. He was painfully aware of how _rare_ he was; if there _were_ others like him, they were still in the testing phases, proprietary and kept under heavy-duty lock and key. What would these technology companies do when they found out about him? Who would claim him? Would he even be allowed to _live_ once the world found out _how_ he became like this?

Some would argue that he wasn’t even alive anymore. The real Fjord died on the _Catterick_ during the attack. Fjord still wasn’t sure he disagreed. Not entirely. But believing that himself and having strangers debate it while deciding what to do with him was something completely different.

He’d be just like the creature they’d kept in their tube, except he wouldn’t have someone like Yasha to put him out of his misery.

They needed a solution that didn’t involve L&N but, at the moment, he was coming up empty.

“I think— I think the o-only reason I’m not dead is be— because of wh— Well. I think we have some time to sort this out.”

“Fjord, I don’t—” Jester starts to say but then, loud enough to drown her out: _I rode my bicycle past your window last night. I roller skated to your door at daylight. It almost seems like you're avoiding me—_ He almost thinks at first that it’s just in his own head again, that maybe the piece that made a home for itself in him was doing this, it had some sort of bizarre _connection_ to the pieces of itself that had been left behind, but then he sees the others reacting, searching for the source, trying to cover their ears. “It’s the song Fjord was hearing!” Jester shouts. It’s coming through the same place that their voices did when they were talking to each other through the ship.

“Cockpit,” Fjord says, stands up and loses his footing, gets stuck like he had earlier. He grits his teeth. _Come on_. He starts moving. “Nott!”

“Oh! Uh. Right!” Nott says, apparently not realizing she might be needed, and the two of them head for the ladder. Behind him, he hears Beau say Yasha’s name again and they’re following but, when they get to the same place, they head down instead of up. Even over the noise, he’s aware that Nott isn’t the only one coming with him but it didn’t matter.

Nott is through the door before he is but Fjord gets to the chair first, wakes up the console and the boards are fireworks of lights, flashing warnings and windows.

_ERROR. ERROR. ERROR. ERROR—_

A million errors but not one of them that was saying exactly what was _wrong_.

“I need to get— To g-get—” He needed to get the _Bathynomus_ to as solid of a ground as he could get down here. They were still in the trench and—if anything failed badly enough that they became literally dead in the water—they could wind up plummeting like a stone to the bottom. It was possible they would be able to get back out because, eventually, the ship would be too big to go any further but there was no guarantee. They could get permanently wedged. He hears Molly’s voice in the back of his head: _I_ _only gamble if I know I’m going to win._

Brushing all of the messages away like Yasha clearing off the table, Fjord brings up navigation, selects the manual controls and finds himself relieved when it allows him to take over. He takes the ship up and out, brings it to a halt about a hundred feet away—he should take it farther but the music is increasing in volume and he can’t concentrate. _He needs it to stop._

“Go,” he says, lets Nott take his place and she starts working, talks to him, but he can’t hear what it is—it might not have actually even been meant for him at all. Her fingers move quickly as she types, sorting through the bright red notices and lines of code he could never read but nothing changes. An audible noise of frustration erupts from her and she leaps down from the chair, gets down underneath the console but she starts to struggle, can’t get the panel open to reach its insides.

“ _Help me_ ,” she hollers and Fjord is about to but then a blue blur comes rushing in past him and Jester drops to her knees, curls her fingers into the handle and _wrenches_ the door not only open but completely off its hinges. Nott disappears almost entirely into the hole amongst the wires and blinking boxes.

_Well, I've got a brand new pair of roller skates, you've got a brand new k—_

It stops.

“Holy shit,” Fjord hears Molly say after a moment, “Human music is awful.”

“I think it’s quite catchy,” Jester says from where she’s still sitting on the floor.

“You— You fixed it,” Fjord says.

“Uhhhh…” Nott drags out. “I made it stop. That’s the important part.”

“Nott,” Fjord says.

“What?” Fjord doesn’t respond. He’s not sure he’d be able to get through a full sentence without sounding like a gibbering mess. She probably knows that, has no reason to be intimidated by his silent staring, but she caves to it anyway. “Until I can figure out exactly what— what _that thing_ did, communications are down.” Jester frowns.

“Just on this ship, though, right? Fjord won’t be able to talk to us from up here.”

“That would be nice,” Nott says. She doesn’t need to say anything more for Fjord to get it, even though his brain takes a couple of extra seconds to catch up. It’s not just the internal communications that were offline. They couldn’t talk to _anyone_.

Their tin can no longer had a string.

 

& & & &

 

“The panel in there is fried,” Beau informs them. She and Yasha had gone to the Hatchery (Fjord couldn’t believe how quickly he had taken to calling it that, same as how the _Grimpo_ had stuck but, no matter how ridiculous it sounded, it was easier than leaving it wholly undefined), assuming—rightly—that the issue had started with the remains that had yet to be cleaned up, all of them too distracted by Fjord’s problem to bother with it. “The one that controls the tube, the hatch. All the people parts are still there but, fuck, man. It survived getting shot up once, yeah? And it’s small enough to get into Fjord’s brain so… I don’t know.”

If that was the case—that some piece of it endured the physical trauma and managed to make an escape—then it could be _anywhere_ in the ship. The fact that it tapped into the communications first was strange. The fact that it remembered the song was even stranger. Fjord still had no idea if it was trying to use it to talk to them or if it was simply something it had latched onto while holding together the parts of the _Johnsonii_ crew and didn’t know anything else, like a baby learning it’s first word and repeating it over and over and over.

“So let’s see here,” Molly says. “The way to get the hatch open so we can leave is broken, the tube has a hole in it, we can’t talk to anybody, there’s an alien loose in the walls of the ship, and our Captain is… Well. Let’s just call it impaired. Did I miss anything?” Jester counts each one out on a finger before replying.

“Nope! That’s everything.”

“Well, then I say we call this whole thing a wash and go home while Fjord can still fly this damn thing,” Molly says, referring both to the deterioration of the vessel and the one who needed to operate it.

“It’ll take two days,” Jester says. “Maybe Nott should try to fix the communications instead. We can call for help. They’ll send someone.”

“We hope,” Molly counters.

“She should try to fix them anyway,” Beau says.

“I might be able to jury rig something,” Nott tells them, “Maybe to get one message out but the only way I can get it working again for good is for someone removes that thing from the ship. And we have no idea where it is.”

“Caleb’s device thingy can scan for it, can’t it?” Beau asks. “It found it in the creature. And in Fjord.”

“You want me to go over the entire ship with this”—Caleb holds up the small black box he had just previously waved around Fjord’s head—“And try to find something that might be the size of a fingernail?”

“And thus, my suggestion to get the fuck out of dodge,” Molly says. “They can have the ship and all its problems. We slip out the back door into the night, take care of Fjord.” He brushes his hands together. “Move on.” Fjord feels his jaw painfully clench. Everything had gone to shit in such a remarkably short amount of time and he’s not even sure who to blame; L&N were keeping things from them but they, in turn, had started keeping secrets from L&N and now they were in it neck-deep and they didn’t have any back-up. Maybe they didn’t need it, but Fjord definitely felt like he wanted the _option_.

He’s thinking in fragments. Disjointed. He shouldn’t be the one making decisions, and yet the rest of them were all staring at him for the hundredth time since they were all first crammed onto the _Bathynomus_ , waiting for him to say something.

“W-we start— start to head back,” he says eventually. “Try— Try to fix the comm— commun— c-c—. Try to fix it. I’ll get us out of here.”

He doesn’t wait for any of them to respond and walks away, making his way back towards the cockpit.

 

& & & &

 

There’s a knock on the door.

“Fjord?” It’s Nott. She doesn’t explain herself any further, walks in without an invitation. The panel door that Jester had torn off is still on the floor, the rat’s nest inside left exposed. Everything in there looked like everything else; he has no idea how Nott even knew which were the right cables to pull. Maybe she had guessed and crossed her fingers that she wouldn’t make the situation much _much_ worse.

She sidles up beside him, hovers a hand over the screen to the left but then hesitates and he feels her staring. He gestures with one hand. _Go ahead_.

“By the way,” she says. “Caleb… Hm. Caleb said I should give this back to you. I don’t really make a habit out of _returning_ what I’ve taken but…” A hand held out, fingers curled around something and she opens them to reveal the symbol of Bahamut that Elva had given them at the start of their mission, right before they’d left. Fjord hadn’t even noticed it was missing. He almost tells her to keep it but changes his mind, accepts the token.

“Thank you,” he says. She grunts in response.

They work in silence for a few minutes until, out of the blue, Fjord’s left foot pitches forward, the toes of his boots _slamming_ into the bottom of the console in front of him.

“Everything… alright?” Nott asks after she yelps in surprise, taking a moment to catch her breath.

“I, uh… I didn’t—” _I didn’t do that on purpose_. It just happened all on its own.

“Do you think you’re gonna make it through two days?” Nott questions. “Maybe someone else should do it.”

“I’ll be fine,” Fjord replies. One of the others must have gotten them to the trench but it wasn’t far from the wreckage and there weren’t too many obstacles in the way. The ship could have done most of the work, as it had been since they started. But now—with that _thing_ lost in the walls, fucking with the internal wiring and computers and god knew what else—Fjord didn’t trust anyone but himself to get them home.

It would mean little sleep and, likely, that he would have to stay holed up in here without a break but he figured he could handle it. He’s worked long shifts before, doing more physical labor than he was right now. Then again, he was working with full capacity all those times before; now he might as well be driving drunk. It also meant that he’d have at least two days of nothing but his own disordered thoughts to keep him company once Nott figured out a way to get them back in contact with L&N, even for a brief moment. _If_ she figured it out. Maybe they were better off keeping the string cut until they returned.

He gets them back to the _Johnsonii_ and he almost starts to move past it but then changes his mind, brings the ship slowly to a halt. Someone had— _Yasha_. It was Yasha. She’d suggested dumping the body of the creature once she had taken care of it. The damage had already been done, though. It might not be worth the trouble. And the crew deserved to be brought home—what little pieces of them were left—and not discarded back on the bottom of the ocean.

“What is it?” Nott asks, difficult not to notice they weren’t moving any longer.

“N-nothing,” Fjord says. He’s about to get them going again when the pain that was already becoming an old friend surges. He curses and he thinks, for just a split second, that he can _feel_ it. Not a _voice_ but a _movement_ , like a bug had crawled in through his ear, up into his head, the legs moving as it scrabbled to get out. It was reacting. A frenzy, like the creature slamming a fist against the tube when it knew he was there. When it _recognized him_.

His eyes are blinking unevenly, rapidly, without his control and his leg kicks forward, foot hitting the console once, twice, three times—

He hears Nott squeak out a noise of fear and duck down, covering her head but she hadn’t been looking at him; she was staring out the window. Fjord looks up and, through his warped vision, he sees—floating out of the darkness—a massive white behemoth.

“Oh.” He says and then: black.

 

& & & &

 

It’s not the same sort of void that he’s been in before and he knows that he isn’t unconscious, he’s _aware_ enough that he can understand that. He can’t see. He’s _blind_. He thinks he can hear noises but they’re impossibly distant—far away, like trying to listen to a conversation on the other side of a house, people talking in the kitchen while he stands in the front yard.

He’s in his body but he’s not in his body. And how funny was that, that he didn’t consider this _his body_ until he lost control of it?

Thinking is— _It’s th— th— thinking. Not? Wh— what… Wh— Where. How can— Chi— Child— Child— Where is— This isn’t me— Wh? Not. Bu— bu—_

He stops. Being _aware_ , taking note of what is and isn’t is all he can do. Anything else requires more effort, more _power_. He’d rather be awake than coherent. So focus on that.

_Wake up. Wake up. Wake up._

_Your crew needs you._

Like turning on bright lights, the world comes back. He hasn't moved. The others are there. There are, strangely, no alarms. The ship isn’t in pieces. He’d almost wonder if that creature had even showed up at all if he hadn’t remembered how Nott reacted. Was it still—? Eyes flicker upwards. Floating. It looks like the monster they’d brought on board, only so much bigger. So much more grotesque.

A moment of clarity: how many people have died down here to make that thing?

“Fjord!” Jester. He lifts an arm as high as he can get it, the metal joints fighting against him, and points towards the window. “We know,” she says. He wants to say _I know you know. Do something about it_ , but when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out except for a few mechanical clicks. Jester frowns, worried. He tries again. He shakes his head. She starts to say something but Caleb interrupts.

“Do you remember asking about a child?” Fjord's head feels heavy when he turns it, tries to find him and catches the edge of a brown coat. There were burn scars on his hands. How did he not notice those before? He was getting— Child? He didn’t have— _Chi— Child— Child— Where is—_ He swallows. There’s a static-y, fuzzy feeling in the back of his skull.

He’s not sure why it isn’t attacking.

“We think it believes its child might still be on board. Still alive,” Caleb says. Had Fjord said that out loud? He couldn’t have. He parts his lips and _click click click_. Just good timing. He feels as if they should be more concerned about his situation, about him not being able to speak, but Caleb is talking to him as if he’s expecting to lose him again and wants to tell him what’s going on before that happens. “Which it is. In a way. But not the way it had left it.”

Fjord hoists up his other arm, hits the console with his hand but he doesn’t know why. There was something they were supposed to do.

There was something Caleb had shown him a little while ago. He can’t recall what it meant but maybe it would be of use. Bringing his arms back towards his body, he lays his right hand palm up, curls the other into what appeared to be a thumbs up and rests it on his open palm, brings both hands towards his chest.

Everything disappears.

_Where. Where is my. Where is. WHERE IS MY CHILD._

When he forces himself to come back all he can hear is the _wheeum wheeum wheeum_ of something horribly wrong. He’s not in his chair anymore. Things look— He’s on the floor. He’s on the floor but there’s another figure in the seat. He can’t be in two places at once. So that must be—

“Molly!” Someone yells.

“I’m working on it!” Molly shouts back. There are other bodies picking themselves up. Unsteady. He watches without moving his head. They didn’t _feel_ like they were moving but the panic is palpable. What the hell had—

_WHAM._

Something big, something _heavy_ , hits the side of the ship. Yells, groans. Someone stumbles over him and, instinctively, he reaches up and grabs their ankle, stops them from braining themselves on the wall. Surprise. A face peers down. Beau.

“Hey.” Quiet, just for him. But then louder, for the rest: “Hey!” She shakes her leg. _Let go_. He tells his hand but it takes a few seconds too long for it to listen.

“I know you’re a little fucked up right now, dear,” Molly says, glancing down at Fjord, “But we’d all really appreciate it if you got your shit together and helped us get out of this mess.”

There was something, wasn’t there? Something they _had_. They could _use_. He’s digging through the disarray in his head but it’s not— All he can think of is: why aren’t they using it?

He needed to get up. Molly was right. _We’ve got work to do._ He tries to say something. _Click click click click._ He holds up the hand that had grabbed Beau.

She tries to help but can only get him part of the way there. The creature smashes into the ship again. Progress lost. A large body, all in black. Hands around his biceps. One big heave and he’s on his feet. _Yasha_. She lets go and he expects to fall backwards, right back where he started, but he doesn’t move. _He doesn’t move._

Molly appears in front of him.

“We need you,” he says.  _Your crew needs you._  Fjord’s vision starts to flicker. He’s falling backwards into the pitch black again. He feels hands on either side of his face. “Come on. We don’t have time for that.”

_WHAM._

Just a couple of minutes. Just a couple of minutes more. That’s all they needed from him.

He fights it and, somehow, he wins, is a little more cognizant than he had been. But only just a little. Either the thing in his head was cooling down while it’s mother was busy trying to send them ass over teakettle, or he just got lucky. There’s no way to guess how long it would last. His head. Oh. That still hurt.

“Okay,” Molly says. “There he is.” _Here I am._ “You need to get us in a good spot so Beau and Yasha can send our little package to our new friend.” Right. _That_ was what he was forgetting. He hears the word crystal clear: _Weapon_.

His legs contest each movement. He wants to go forward, they want to stay still. He freezes. An elbow gives him a shove from behind, gets him the rest of the way there and he topples over into his seat. Step one: complete. Both hands would be helpful but he can only seem to spare the energy for one. His fingers brush the screen directly in front of him and he doesn’t recall getting his hand to that point. Step two: completed without him knowing it.

“Even if he _does_ —” _WHAM._ “Even if he _does_ get us in a good spot, they can’t be fired from up here!” They can’t talk to each other. He remembers that. No communication.

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t think that really _fuckin’_ matters right now, Nott!”

“She’s right. The important question is—” _WHAM_. “What genius thought that was a good idea?”

“Likely the geniuses who didn’t want one person to have singular control over two bombs.” Fjord hears them talking but he’s not sure who is who. There’s blue suddenly right beside him.

“Don’t listen to them.” Distinct. Jester. “Ignore them. Listen to me.” He does. “You can do this. Alright? I know you can.” The letters and numbers on the console look like gibberish. It’s taking everything for him to even _know_ those were letters and numbers in the first place. “It’s still on navigation. You just have to use the buttons.”

He was wrong. He needs both hands. Fjord glances at his right one, resting against his thigh. He shifts his gaze to Jester.

_WHAM._

“Okay,” she says, reaches down and picks up his arm, places his hand on the console. Okay. There’s the radar. That’s them. That’s the creature. The weapons— Where did they come from? A voice had said _can’t_ and _from up here_. They’re below him. So he needed to go up. “He’s doing it!” He was. Somehow. The other voices leak through.

“—Going down there!”

“Nott or Caleb. One of you needs to go with her. Decide _now_.” It filters out. It has to, because his hands won’t cooperate.

“Alright,” Jester says. “All you need to do is tell us when to fire and then Caleb will tell Nott who will tell Beau.”

_WHAM._

Fjord feels the ship pitch sideways, start to spin, and he manages to correct it, bring it back around the right way. Still not high enough or maybe it was following them. He closes his eyes briefly. He needs— He needs a layout of the ship. Jester drowns away. All his energy on this and nothing else. There’s what the ship looks like. Flashes of red. Warnings. But there, just by the underbelly, is a hatch, one that he hadn’t gone out of—it’s on the wrong side—and that had to be it. Hatch. Ship. Monster.

He knows the best position.

It takes a lot of maneuvering. He feels himself starting to slip (it’s in there, it’s still in there, he can feel that, too). Just a few more seconds.

There.

He kicks the console and hopes that at least one of them understands.

The shockwave that comes shortly after sends them backwards, bodies spilling. Someone rolls out the open door into the hallway and he lurches out of his chair again, just barely catches the tail end of the explosion in the water.

Black. He doesn’t know how, but he’s aware that he’s screaming. Except it’s not _him_ screaming. There are hundreds of voices all inside him at once. Shouting. Wailing. Asking questions in languages he can’t understand. One of them sounds like his own.

“Calm.” Familiar. Montone. “Dying.”

 _No_ , he thinks, because that was easy, even when his mind was fractured. And then he thinks: _Help._

“Watching,” it says. _—potential, learn, grow, provoke, consume, reward, patience. I’ve got a brand new pair of roller skates, you’ve got a brand new key._ “Problem.” _No shit_ , he wants to say, wants to think, but he can’t because it doesn’t work. And yet he thinks it without thinking it. As if it was somehow pulled out of him. “Unacceptable.”

 _Then do something_ , he thinks but doesn’t think.

“Watching.” And then: “Wake up.”

He comes back. The alarms are still blaring. Someone is yelling at him.

“—Wake up! Fjord! _Wake up!_ ” He’s on the floor again, on his side. He looks at the shadow that’s been cast over him, follows it to the body it’s attached to. Jester. “Beau and Nott are in trouble!” _WHAM._ They’re hit, but it’s not as hard as it had been before. It’s injured now. The ship lurches. “Come on!” She helps him up. He forgot how strong she was. Mouth open, _click click click_. He stares and stares, tries to get the question to her with his eyes. _What kind of trouble?_ “Nott isn’t responding to Caleb.” His head is heavy as he moves it, peers around.

Molly’s taken his seat again. Caleb is propped up beside the door, his head bleeding. Yasha was gone. He felt like he was out for a long time but it must have only been seconds. They were in trouble. They weren’t responding. What could he do from up here? _Nothing._ He walks to the console and Molly starts to stand but Fjord pushes him back down, leaves his hand on his shoulder. Squeezes. _You can do this._

Fjord turns around and starts towards the door.

“Fucking— _Jester_ ,” Molly calls out.

“Will you—?”

“Caleb and I will be fine. Right?” A response but a dazed, murmured one. Good enough.

Fjord makes it out into the hallway and stumbles, staggering forward when his knee locks, his foot freezing, but then there’s an arm around his waist, keeping him steady until it fixes itself. The ladder. He climbs out onto it, grips the rungs and immediately knows that it will take far too long. He could go back. He probably should.

He lets go instead.

Twisting himself last minute, he hits the floor hard on his back. Fjord’s groan is delayed, as if his brain couldn’t keep up with his body and had only just realized what happened.

“Oh my god,” Jester is saying, coming down the ladder fast, her shoes clanking as she lands. “Oh my god, Fjord.” He rolls onto his side, makes an assessment, but it’s difficult when that part of him is busy trying to keep him from descending into the pitch again, trying to allow him to be aware of his surroundings. What he’s doing. What _is_ he doing?

He gets to his feet with effort, lists sideways and uses the wall as support to keep him moving, Jester on his other side, hands hovering. They both know she could probably carry him. Fjord flounders, collapses to his knees. He gets back up, his arm pulled across Jester’s shoulders. They walk forward.

The damage in the room isn’t nearly as bad as Fjord expected, but it’s still _there_. Debris. The transparent wall separating the weapons from the rest of the space is cracked. A console—much like the one he’d just abandoned but smaller—has been smashed by a fallen piece of _something_ from the ceiling. He takes stock. His head involuntarily twitches. Beau: alive. By the console. Frustrated. Yasha: alive. Clearing up debris. Nott: alive. Unconscious. He pats Jester’s arm, indicates towards the Goblin. _Do. That._

She leaves him. So does his foundation.

“Whoa, dude,” Beau says, jumps over a fragment on the floor, catches him. He manages to keep some of the weight off of her. Processing words is— _Wah. Wah wah wah. Wah. Wah._ She’s watching him. _Oh. She spoke_. He puts focus into hearing her and loses most of his legs. “Yasha!” She’s there. _She_ can handle it. “The fucking explosion broke the—” Beau gestures behind her. “I can’t— The only way that shit is going anywhere is if someone sets it off manually but the barrier won’t _open_ and there’s no—” _WHAM. WHAM._ Beau grips Yasha, Yasha holds on to Fjord. Jester covers Nott with her body. And then it’s over. “There’s no goddamn fucking time!”

They’d need to get dressed. Need a suit. Just in case. There’s someone on here that didn’t, though.

Oh. Right. It was him.

He nods. Or maybe that was another involuntary twitch. Fjord puts his energy into his legs again, pulls away from Yasha. They could try to run, but it would likely chase them. They could wait it out. This ship was designed to take a beating. (So they said.) The _thing_ would die of its injuries. Eventually. Probably. (Probably not.)

Looking to each of them, he puts every bit of brain power he could spare into it. His vision fades, like a lamp threatening to black out. His hearing goes tinny. His nerve endings fire painfully. Fuzz. Static. _Th— Thoughts bro— brok— broken. Click click click click click—_

_Sometimes you gotta get a little stupid._

“Go.”

“The fuck—” Beau curses, says “What the _fuck_ ” when Yasha lets go of Fjord, starts herding her towards the door and Fjord swears that he hears her ask him if he’s sure, but he’s too slow to respond.

“Do not die,” Jester says, stopping in front of him, Nott in her arms. There’s a look on her face that Fjord knows means something. She wants to stay. She would, if she didn’t have to take care of Nott.

“Go,” he says, because he can manage that. Only that. She goes.

He moves cumbersome feet, joints locked, towards the translucent divider, the one with the crack. The one with the weapon on the other side. He tries throwing himself against it at first but he knows it won’t work. Picking up the heaviest piece of junk he can handle, he starts hitting it instead. He has no idea how he’s doing it. He shouldn’t be able to. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was imagining it and his arms were just hanging there. Either way, he’s not making progress.

_WHAM. WHAM._

He falls back, regains balance. He’s about to try again when a figure walks past him, the scrap in his hands one second and then gone the next. Yasha lifts her massive arms and starts clobbering.

After the sixth hit, the barrier shatters. She turns to Fjord. There’s something different about her. Angrier. But why would she be _angry_? She tosses the garbage to the ground, moves over to him. For a split second, he thinks she’s going to attack him but she puts an arm around him instead, same as Jester has, practically lifts him off the floor as she propels him forward.

The weapon is huge. It’s huge and they hadn’t told him how to do this. Beau probably knew but he’d sent her away. Like he’d summoned her, like he’d _asked_ (he didn’t, because he couldn’t; he’s deteriorating again, he can feel it creeping up on him, his thoughts are like a bag of random letters being shaken, the hand hoping a real word would appear once they dumped it out) she’s there. He’s pretty sure he told them both to leave.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Uh.” She slams an elbow against a closed door on the side and she swears, shakes her arm. “It was some stupid code. It was, uh.” Pushes buttons. _WHAM._ She grabs Fjord, both of them holding each other up. “ _Dammit!_ ” Fjord slumps against the metal casing, the smooth surface. It feels cool against his face but he’s not sure if he’s really feeling it. Beau’s typing, muttering. “There. Hey. Hey!” She’s talking to him. “Push that.” He lifts a hand but she brushes it away. “Not—” _Not yet, dumbass. Not while we’re both still here._ It seemed like the right thing to do but no. He wouldn’t hurt them. Not on purpose.

“Let’s go,” Yasha says. Not to him. They’d come back when he’d told them to go and now they were leaving again.

“Fuck that,” Beau says. Or not. “We need to get him out.” She knows he won’t make it. They probably all know. They’re staring at each other.

 _WHAM._ The ship pitches sickeningly sideways, nearly goes upside-down but then straightens out.

“Go,” Fjord says. _Both of you_. The alien in his head is panicking. Maybe it knows, too. He’s going, going— He only has enough strength to do two more things. One of those is pushing the button. He could either force them out or try to get himself somewhere safe. Can’t do both. Yasha solves the issue for him. He hears the door close and then he’s on his own.

_Push. Pu— Push. Do it._

The side of his hand slams against the bright red button. A different alarm than the one still going all around him. _Whee. Whee. Whee._ He hoists himself up off the missile ( _the bomb_ ) and lurches away from it. _Whee. Whee. Whee._ He doesn’t even know if it’s going to hit the creature once it’s released. He just guesses. He _hopes_.

His knees freeze and so does he and, suddenly, he doesn’t know why they were so worried.

They wouldn’t have designed this so obtusely. Risk a life to end another.

_Whee. Whee. Whee._

He keeps walking anyway but he can’t contend with the blackness anymore. He must succumb.

Three things happen at once: The floor opens, releasing the bomb. The creature hurls itself against the ship, sending it tipping forward. Fjord loses his footing—is too non-functioning to do anything to stop it—and slides backwards, feet-first through the hole.

He immediately starts to sink. They must have been a long way up from the ground.

He watches as the missile collides with the creature, an impressively-sized hole already ragged in its side.

_Where is it. Wh— Where— W-w-WHERE IS MY CHILD._

Fire. It splits open. Skin. Body parts. Endless, endless body parts. Pieces of metal. Pieces of _ships_. The shockwave sends the _Bathynomus_ backwards again, hits Fjord in the side, pushing him with it, flying through the water. Ragdoll. He smacks into the underbelly of the ship which is the only thing that stops his momentum. And then all is quiet. And then he starts to sink again.

Further and further into the void, farther away from the light of the ship. _His_ ship. Their ship. He’s not sure how he’s still awake. Didn’t the voice tell him he was dying? _I should be dead._ But then: _I don’t want to be._ He tries to right himself, to swim up, but something still isn’t working. Only one of his arms will respond. Only _one side of him_ will respond.

There’s something coming towards him and he mistakes it for the parts from someone the creature had swallowed, molded into itself a long time ago but no: this one is moving with purpose. _Swimming_. He sees the lights on the helmet, one of Caleb’s Dancing Lights following close behind. A hand reaches out and he lifts his own to meet it.

He can’t hear Jester through the helmet, but he can understand her words clearly when she moves her mouth.

“Got you.”

 

& & & &

 

Jester pushes him up through the floor—into the drone’s room, the same place she must have jumped out of which wasn’t safe, it was a naive stab in the dark and Fjord didn’t think he could be more grateful that she had taken it—and he uses his good arm to help pull himself up and out of the water, watches as Jester comes up behind him and the hatch rumbles as it closes.

He lays there on the metal floor dripping with seawater, feeling his throat reopen, and he takes in a deep breath, watches without moving his head as Jester sits up, legs splayed out in front of her. She wrenches off her helmet, tossing it aside.

“Fjord,” she says. “Are you okay?” She crawls over to him, her face leaning over him, blocking his view of the ceiling. He has no idea what he looks like; how beaten up he may or may not be. “Oh. I told you this stuff wouldn’t last in the water.” She gestures to his right side and he turns his head, glances down at it. The bandages that she had so carefully wrapped around him to give him the appearance of actual skin—to make him feel better—was soggy and sloughing off. He reaches over his body, cleans it away into a messy pile on the floor and, when he finishes, he feels Jester taking his hand. She leans down, rests her forehead on his damp shoulder.

He opens his mouth but then hesitates. Clears his throat.

“How’s everyone else?” His voice still _click clicks_ when he speaks but he _can_ _speak_ and, for now, that was all that mattered. Jester laughs. She doesn’t get a chance to answer, though, because just then the door opens and ‘everyone else’ comes flooding into the room. They stop, observe the other two on the floor because, for a moment, it must look like Jester is mourning but then Fjord twists to face them. “You guys alright?”

“Yes, you remarkable, _colossal_ idiot,” Molly says, drops down to Fjord’s other side, his garish coat flowing out around him, “A few bumps and bruises, but I think we’ll make it.”

“I second that,” Beau says, “The part about you being a fucking idiot.” As if it was _his_ fault he’d fallen out of the ship. As if he’d done it on purpose.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Fjord asks. It stopped the creature at the very least; considering how the smaller one had reacted after getting blown to pieces, he didn’t have much faith that two massive bombs were going to be enough to stop it. They still had to get out of there and sooner rather than later would be ideal but, for the moment, he figured he could revel in the fact that, not only had both the ship and its crew made it out of that relatively unscathed, but he himself was very much _still alive_ and likely the only reason he was was because of what he’d been made into. He still didn’t like it. He still had a lot to think about, a lot of work until he _accepted_ it, but it had saved everyone’s lives and, for now, he thinks that’s something he could appreciate.

He doesn’t feel the alien in his head anymore. Either it had gone dormant or it was dead. There was no way to know from where he is but his thoughts weren’t stuttering. There was a clarity there that had been missing for hours. The downside, of course, to having control (having all of his _senses_ ) back meant that he felt everything again and _everything hurt_. He props himself up on the elbow that still allowed him to move it but only gets so far, groans and flops back down, the back of his head hitting the floor a little too hard.

“I think I could use a little help,” he says and Yasha advances, stands by his feet and leans over him, both hands out towards him but Fjord only offers his left in return. She doesn’t ask any questions, changes tactics and grips his forearm with one hand, his bicep with the other and hauls him up. He starts to cant sideways but she braces him, keeps him standing.

“Okay,” Jester says, comes around to his other side, holds the dead weight he’s now carrying. “Let’s go fix you up.”

“How, exactly, do you plan to do that?” Fjord questions as they start to move. He doesn’t like how he sounds but it’s a better alternative to not making any sounds at all.

“When I was a little girl, my mother bought me an AndRoise”—An early prototype AI, manufactured by a tech toy company and sold to kids, a testing ground to see how it worked, if it would even work at all; they were, ultimately, a failure as far as Fjord had read but there were still some around, knockoffs produced every other year—“And one day it stopped walking. I was very upset and my mother told one of her clients to fix it and it only took him a few minutes. When I got her back, she was good as new.” They reach the ladder and stop at the bottom.

“What’s your point?”

“Well. You’re sort of like an AndRoise. It can’t be _that_ hard, can it?” He doesn’t bring up the fact that, only a couple hours earlier, she’d been in a tizzy about poking around in his head without the proper equipment. “Besides, Caleb says that Nott’s fixed Frumpkin many times. Maybe this is something she can do. Since it’s not your brain.” She taps the side of his head and winks.

 

& & & &

 

Going up is a lot more difficult than it had been going down but they make it work and, luckily, the medical room is only a couple floors away from where they started. Both Nott and Caleb are already there, sitting on the table Fjord’s already been on too many times since this whole mission started and went awry and Nott looks up, a piece of Re-Patch on the side of her head, peeking out from under her black hair. Caleb has one, too—a mirror image of Nott. He looks drawn, pale.

They both move when Fjord comes staggering in, giving him space, and Yasha and Jester flop him down, give him a chance to get reacquainted with the ceiling, the whorls and small, strange gouges in the brushed steel.

“Are you… alright?” Caleb asks, parroting without knowing it what Fjord had asked the others just moments before.

“Somewhat,” Fjord replies.

“You know,” Caleb says and Fjord is aware that Jester is lowering the scanner, planning on running it over him again and there it is: the anxiety, the thrumming in his chest from a heart that had never stopped working even though, after that blast, it probably should have, “While I _am_ a fan of calculated risks—”

“Really? You are?” Fjord asks, surprised, clarifies when Caleb gives him a quizzical look. “It's just... you don't seem the type.”

“Stop talking,” Jester commands.

“I was _going_ to say,” Caleb continues after a brief quiet, as if he had assumed the order was meant for them both, “That I am a fan of calculated risks but I think what you just did was quite foolish.” Another pause. “Although it did put an end to things. So thank you.”

“You know, if I had known everyone would just go around insulting me after it was over, I might not have done it at all,” Fjord says.

“ _Fjord_ ,” Jester reprimands.

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You guys all cool in here?” Beau asks from the doorway, points both her index fingers at them. “‘Cause there’s something I wanna go check out.” She leaves without waiting for an answer.

“I should, uh. I’ll just…” Yasha bows slightly, awkwardly, her arms crossed over her chest, says something about her being glad he was alright and then walks off in the opposite direction that Beau had jogged off in.

“Well. I don’t have anywhere else to be. So…” Molly says, sits down in one of the two available chairs, stretches his legs out, puts his hands behind his head. After another minute—the scanner humming, blinking—Caleb mumbles that he should _go check on his lab_ and Nott goes to follow but Jester tells her to wait.

“Fjord might need your help.” Nott exhales noisily but does not complain. She stays. Reluctantly. “Wowie,” Jester says once the scan is finished. She peers over the screen at him, frowning, and then ducks back behind it, studying it.

“Well, don’t keep us all in suspense,” Molly says.

“Hm. Okay. Your insides are where they should be. So that’s good. It’s really hard to tell just by looking. But uh… Whatever is wrong probably isn’t major. Maybe you just need a reboot.”

“So your suggestion is I… go to sleep?” Fjord asks. Jester lifts a shoulder. “Is that it? I mean, what about…” _What about that thing in my head._

“Oh. That. Yeah, it’s still there.” She turns the screen towards him and, once again, he’s staring at himself. Metal. Wires. Even after everything, it still felt _wrong_. And then there, in his head, the red warning words: _FOREIGN MATTER DETECTED_. “You sound good though. Except for… you know.” She makes a weird clicking noise, pushing the tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth, somehow makes it sound almost exactly like the mechanical clicking that came out every time Fjord spoke. “It might be dead. We kill momma, the babies die.”

“If that’s true,” Nott says, “Then we should be able to get communications back. As long as it didn’t eat something important.” But there’s no sound of someone attempting to get in contact— Fjord remembers, then, Nott yanking a few wires free from the console. Even if this _had_ created a chain reaction that killed the others, it was still offline until Nott reattached everything.

“Maybe they’re not hungry after all. It didn’t eat Fjord. Or he didn’t taste good. It could have been like licking a battery.” Jester pokes Fjord’s shoulder. “Zap.”

“I don’t know. I find licking batteries to be quite thrilling,” Molly says.

“Guys, please,” Fjord says. “I’m only half-working here. I can’t get us going anywhere with only an arm and a leg.”

“Grumpy,” Jester says.

“I almost died.”

“Are you going to milk that the _entire_ rest of the way home?” Molly asks but, when Fjord glances at him, he can clearly see that he he’s teasing him. “Besides, isn’t there some human saying about being able to do something with one arm tied behind their backs?”

“I thought it was a head,” Jester says.

“They’ve only got the one,” Nott reminds her, as if she didn’t know that.

“That would be _way_ more impressive than an arm.” After that, Nott asks for something to stand on, for more light, and Jester lifts the table up with a switch, just enough to have Fjord in a sitting position.

“I brought the tools I use to fix Frumpkin. Just in case. And just the small ones. If he got crushed or ripped apart, that’s his problem,” Nott says. “I’ll be right back.” She returns with a small bundle wrapped in leather. It still smelled new, and Fjord gets a sudden _visceral_ reminder of somewhere he’d left behind, the ranch that he’d spent a year at with five other people. None of them saw each other for very long because they all took on whatever shipping jobs were available and with that came long stretches of time out in space. They’d just needed somewhere _normal_ they could lay their heads once they were back on solid ground and the old rancher who owned the place was lonely. There were nights that Fjord would sit out on the back deck that had been built by hand with knotted wood and stare up at the sky, whiskey in his hand.

“Don’t you get tired of looking at that?” One of his housemates had asked one evening. He probably should have. He’d seen an endless amount of it to get there, even more when he was on a job. But he looked anyway.

After what happened to him last year, he’d stopped looking.

“You wanted this,” Nott reminds him. “You’re not allowed to be angry with me if I mess up.”

“I won’t be angry with you,” Fjord assures her.

“People say that…” They say that, but that’s not something you could ever truly promise. “I guess you’re lucky that it’s this arm”—She knocks his exposed arm with the tip of some long, pointed instrument—“So I don’t have to cut into the other one.” Poking at a series of plating in his wrist, she grimaces. “It’s weird doing this while you’re awake.”

“Trust me,” Fjord says, “I’m not enjoying it either.” If he could shut himself off for this, he would. He glances at the other two still hovering, although Jester was at least _attempting_ to look busy, picking up fallen bottles and boxes that had tumbled from the cabinets when the ship was being tossed around. “You don’t have to stay.”

“I know I don’t _have_ to,” Molly says.

“I’m your doctor,” Jester says, putting a plastic brown bottle onto a shelf after giving it a shake. “It would be bad form if I left.”

Nott works in relative silence, the only sounds the scraping of her tools, the thrum of the _Bathynomus_ still working around them, and the soft singing from Jester, a song that Fjord doesn’t recognize. Twenty minutes go by and he feels a sharp _snap_ of electricity all the way from the tip of his index finger, up his arm, his neck, and into the back of his head.

“You felt that?” Nott asks.

“ _Yes_.”

“Hm.” She continues working. Another ten minutes and then she lifts her head, rubs at her eyes with the back of a hand. “Do we have duct tape anywhere on board?”

“Seriously?” Fjord asks.

“Frumpkin is about half duct tape by now,” Nott says. She hesitates, glances up at each of them. “Don’t tell Caleb.” Jester starts opening drawers, sticking her hands in and searching all the way in the back, crouching to rummage through the cabinets closer to the floor.

“Ah-ha!” She exclaims, triumphant, holds up a thick round of silver tape. “There you go.” She puts it down on Fjord’s stomach.

“You’re gonna have to help me,” Nott says. “I can’t hold these in place and use the tape at the same time.” Glancing down at his arm—which he had been avoiding, purely because watching yourself be operated on is not something anybody wants to see, even if there’s no blood—he finds Nott holding two identical slim, pointed implements, one in each hand as if they were keeping something in place. Jester looks to Molly, raises a closed fist. Fjord sighs. One, two, three. He doesn’t see what Molly throws, but he makes a noise that sounds as if he definitely didn’t win. “Take these,” Nott says, waits for Molly to have a grip on them before letting go. “Do. Not. Move.”

“What if I have to sneeze?” Molly asks. Nobody laughs. “I won’t sneeze.” _Rip_. Nott tears off a small piece with her teeth, goes into the space between the two tools that Molly is holding, one eye squinting, her tongue poking out as she tries to concentrate. She tears a second piece.

“Almost…” She says and Beau chooses that exact moment to come storming back to them, loudly erupting with:

“You guys aren’t going to _fucking_ believe this!” Molly slips, Nott says _whoops_ , and Fjord’s arm involuntarily lifts up, smacking Molly directly in the face. Beau appears in the doorway just in time to witness it and her anger disperses for a few seconds so she can bark out a laugh, follows it with a slow clap. “Ah, man. That was beautiful.”

“Shit, Molly,” Fjord says, “Sorry about that.” He turns his upper body just enough to see him, Molly’s hand over his own mouth and nose and Fjord doesn’t realize his arm is moving like it should be until he hears Jester make a noise of surprise. He holds his hand up, rotates it this way and that, flexes the fingers like he’s done so many times before. The tools were still sticking out of him like porcupine quills, the silver tape glinting in the light but it _worked_. “Look at that.” He looks over to Beau. “What aren’t we going to believe?”

“Oh. Right. That— I can’t— Look at this.” She walks in, pulls a squat, cylinder-type metal object out from under her arm where she’d tucked it to applaud the display she’d just watched and drops it heavily on the same tray that Nott was using to hold her tools, making them rattle. She gestures at it. _Look at it_. Shoulders drop, an exhale is pushed out. “It’s an SPE.”

“Sonic Pulse Emitter,” Fjord says. “Yeah. We’re supposed to have one.”

“I _know_. The problem is— It fu— It’s been sending out a pulse. A _major_ one. I don’t know since when but it must have been after you came in from that trench or it would have messed you up once it hit you.” Fjord stares at her a moment, turns his attention to the object sitting in front of him, is only vaguely aware that Nott had started poking at his leg but she pauses, looks to the SPE as well. He may have been glitching, a little unstable for a few hours, but he knows that he hadn’t been the one to turn it on; he’d _remember_ doing that, sending out the signal that would call that creature directly to them. He would, wouldn’t he? There’d been a moment, right before it showed, that things had gone just little _too_ cockeyed. He could have. He wants to believe he didn’t. Which meant, then, one of two things: either someone _else_ on board had turned it on without telling anyone or L &N had done it somehow themselves. It likely wouldn’t have been the first time they had tampered with it, if the way the _Johnsonii_ crew member had spoken about it malfunctioning was any indication.

If that was true, then what had they assumed? That they’d gone rouge? Turn on the SPE, let the creature sort them out and, if not, at least they’d be forced to finish the final part of their mission. Of course, that was assuming that they _knew_ whether the weapons had been launched or—at the particular point in time when Beau guessed it had been turned on—not. Despite what they’ve surmised about the company that hired them so far, that idea seemed almost ridiculously convoluted. They’d made a point of repeating how sturdy the ship was, how much it could tolerate. Everyone involved would know that the creature attacking them would only halt their progress for a short amount of time. It’d be easier to wait for the _Bathynomus_ to return and interrogate them once they were all on dry land.

Unless they’d tripped it for another reason entirely, one that he couldn’t think of right now. He rubs at his head.

“It doesn’t hurt again, does it?” Jester asks.

“No.” He’s being truthful. “I’m just—” Frustrated. He’s working over the ‘how’s and ‘why’s of L&N doing this to them because he doesn’t _want_ it to have been someone here. He doesn’t want to check the logs and see that the emitter had been accessed by a member of the crew, know that one of his new friends had put them in jeopardy. And for what? There _was_ a third option he was forgetting: it could have been the alien that was still in the walls of their ship, calling for help. “We need to check the logs. And then I think it’ll be time for another family meeting.”

“Might I suggest Priority One be ‘get the hell out of here’?” Molly asks. He was right. They were currently floating in a graveyard—one that was full of creatures that very well may come back to life. Fjord sighs. _It never ends._

“Jester. Do you have crutches in here somewhere?” He has his arm. He could hobble. Getting up and down the ladder would be a pain, but he could manage it. He’d _have_ to manage it. She frowns, moves to start looking around but Molly holds up a hand, palm facing her. _Stop_.

“I think I can handle flying this thing a few feet,” Molly says, looks to Nott. “I do need to borrow you. Should only take a minute.” He leaves without waiting for someone—namely, Fjord—to object and Nott all but rolls her eyes but hops down from the chair she’d been standing on and follows, grumbling either to herself or Caleb as she left.

“Jester,” Fjord says once they’re gone, “Crutches? Please.”

“Why?”

“I just want to check on Caleb, that’s all.” He probably should see Yasha eventually as well, but she seemed as if she’d be better equipped to handle herself after an experience like the one they just went through. Besides, he at least knew exactly where Caleb was; it wasn’t very far. He had to do _something_ while he waited for Nott to return. He didn’t like just sitting here.

“Oh. Well, Beau can do that,” Jester says.

“I— What?” Beau asks, looks up from studying Fjord’s scan with a deep frown. “No. I don’t think—”

“Come on. It’s not that hard. Just go in there and say ‘hi, Caleb, how are you?’ or ‘We just wanted to make sure that you were doing okay’...”

“And smile,” Fjord says. Beau tries one out on him. “Nevermind. Don’t do that.” Her frown returns.

“Why don’t you do it then, Jester? Huh?”

“What kind of doctor would I be if I abandoned my patient?” Jester asks.

“He’s fine,” Beau says, waves a hand at him. “Y’know, besides the whole leg thing. And the weird voice thing.”

“Go on.” Jester grabs Beau by the shoulders, spins her around and starts pushing her towards the open door.

“This is _not_ your Captain speaking,” Molly’s voice says suddenly, echoing around them. “Internal communications have been restored. The tracker has been bamboozled. So please sit back and enjoy this short flight brought to you by Mollymauk Air. If you want a snack, get it yourself. Alcohol will not be served, unless you ask the person who has it nicely. Thank you and please save the applause until I’m in the room.” The line goes dead and there’s a sudden shift, the strange feeling of inertia, of _movement_ , without being able to see it happening. The speech had given both Jester and Beau pause but, once it finishes, Jester begins pushing her again, the two of them arguing. Nott comes back, sidles past, barely acknowledging them as if this was already old hat.

“‘The tracker has been bamboozled’?” Fjord repeats.

“I might have to go adjust it later but, for now,” she says, climbing back onto her chair, “It thinks we haven’t moved.”

“And L&N? They haven’t tried to contact us? They aren’t _trying_ to contact us?”

“Not a clue. Who needs ‘em anyway, right?” She asks. Either they’d decided not to reconnect the long-range channel or it was still broken. It was probably for the best for the time being; they had to get themselves sorted, repaired. Get their stories straight. Decide what was next. It’d be easier to do that without L&N breathing down their necks. “You know, Someone’s going to have to… Well.” She pokes at his leg again, this time with a finger. She couldn’t fix him with the skin there. She’d been lucky with his arm.

“Right,” he says. By now, Jester had returned sans Beau—who may or may not have found her way to Caleb—and she looks back and forth between them, hands on her hips, but then she drops them at her sides.

“I can do it for you.”

“I’m sure you can,” Fjord says.

“It won’t hurt,” Jester says.

“It will,” Fjord tells her. He’s not _paralyzed_. He simply cannot make his leg _function_. It was something internal. He couldn’t begin to examine it further than that, it wasn’t something within his wheelhouse—he just knew that he still _felt_ , that every time Nott prodded him he knew he was being prodded by a sharp tool or her fingernail. Jester says “oh”, starts scouring through the drawers and cabinets she had only just put back together.

“I have… rubbing alcohol and aspirin,” Jester says, holding a bottle of each out in both hands. Nott leans over Fjord, takes the rubbing alcohol from Jester but, instead of using it on him, she unscrews the cap and takes a swig.

“That’s all that _that’s_ good for,” she says. It was almost comical, really, how understocked this room was or, perhaps, it wasn’t and simply no one had foreseen that they’d need to be doing surgery. Honestly, Fjord couldn’t really blame them for that.

“Just aspirin then,” Jester says. “Probably would have been useful when you had that headache, eh?” She puts the bottle down, the pills rattling. “Kinda funny they gave me a scalpel, though. Maybe they thought I’d be getting into a very tiny sword fight.” Holding up the scalpel Fjord hadn’t noticed on the counter, she waves it like a sword, as if she’s parrying an imaginary enemy. “You know…” She says next, raises and lowers her eyebrows, pressing a button on the tablet, and the door closes, beeps as it locks. “I’ll have to take your pants off.”

“Jester… I brought other pairs. It’s alright if you just cut these ones up.”

She looks disappointed, walks around the table to stand by Nott. “Fine.” She slices a small notch in the cuff of his pant leg and then puts the scalpel between her teeth, grips each side with her fingers and tears the fabric up to his thigh. “Okey-dokey.” Picking a spot by his calf, Jester starts to move the blade towards Fjord's skin but he reaches out to grab her wrist, stopping her. “I’m going to do it real fast.”

“That’s not—” That wasn’t it, not entirely. He’s had time with his hand to see what he really was and he’s seen the scans but those were just pictures. Grainy and monochrome. There was something different about this, about having more of himself exposed, the others seeing it, Nott’s hands _working_ on him.

“You want to walk, don’t you?” Jester asks. He clenches his jaw, glances down at her face, searches her eyes for _something_ but he’s not sure what he’s looking for in there. He lets her go. Gesturing to Nott, Fjord makes a _gimme_ motion but, instead of giving him the rubbing alcohol, she reaches into her pocket and takes out her flask, hands it to him. He takes a hearty gulp, feels it burn on the way down, returns it to Nott and doesn’t miss her taking one, too. “Ah-boop,” Jester says, plucking it from her and sniffing it as if considering taking a sip of her own but then changes her mind, hands it back. “Here we go.”

It hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but the scalpel is sharp and Jester is just as fast as she said she would be; he doesn’t watch, but he hears Nott’s aversion, the way Jester sucked air in between her teeth.

“Wow,” Jester said, “This is _really weird_. Didn’t you think it was strange? That you didn’t bleed anymore?”

“Guess I never got hurt that badly after it happened,” Fjord replies through clenched teeth.

“You. Uh… You’re going to have to… hold him open,” Nott says. There’s a tremor, low on the edges of her voice when she talks, as if this isn’t something she was enjoying being a part of, _anywhere but here, please, god_ , but there was nothing she could do about it now unless she wanted to bail. “Oh god.” She sounds like she’s considering it. For the briefest of moments, Fjord finds himself wishing the alien nestled in his head still would start wriggling its way into the nooks and crannies of his brain and turn the part of him off that had to feel any of this.

“Please tell me this is going to be easier than my arm.”

“Mhm. Well. It— Hang on. If it’s the same issue…” She trails off, too lost in what she’s doing. Five minutes. A jolt of electricity up his leg. Seven. “Hold these.” She’s speaking to Jester. “Don’t sneeze.” The _rip_ of tape being torn. “Ah. Damn.” He hears her take another drink. Fjord knows what the problem is. He _knows_ and he also knows what he has to do. Maybe he could ask that energy to do him the favor of blocking this memory later. His artificial skin is soft, lubricated on the inside but not because of blood; he swallows, turns his head away and focuses on one of the cabinets, the lights inside illuminating labels, distorting the clear material the boxes and bottles are made from, casting shadows on the walls inside. “Let me just…”

His knee jolts suddenly, bends, and he’s grateful that he didn’t kick either of them in the teeth.

“ _Never_ ,” Nott says as Fjord pulls in and straightens out his leg a few times, “ _Ever_ make me have to do that again. Find yourself some other robot fixer to put you back together because that was so much worse than—”

“Nott,” Fjord says.

“ _What._ ”

“Thank you.” She frowns at him in response but then nods just the once and jumps down from her chair, bundling her tools together and walking to the door. Rapping on it with her knuckles, she waits for Jester to unlock it for her and let her out, muttering to herself again and unscrewing the lid from her flask.

“Luckily for you,” Jester says, “The only thing I _do_ have a lot of here is Cure Wounds. Otherwise, I would have just had to duct tape you back together.” She fetches a tube from a drawer, sits down with a flourish in the empty seat, bends over closer to his leg. The liquid she squeezes out is cold and clear but has the consistency of glue, and she takes a couple minutes to spread it along one side of the split in his leg, pressing and holding it together. “Tah-dah! Good as new! I could use this on your pants, if you want.”

“I’m not particularly attached to them.”

“Well, you’re still wearing them so, technically, you _are_.” She laughs at her own joke and then: a silence.

“Jester.”

“Yes, Fjord?” He starts to say something but changes his mind, smiles at her instead. She returns it, but just a bit wider. “You know, I’ve never met a robot before.” He cringes, can’t help it. He should tell them, say _please don’t call me that_ , but he can’t. Not yet. He’ll try to let it go. “Unless you count the Traveler. Oh, and Frumpkin, obviously. But you are _definitely_ one of the best ones.”

“Thank you.”

“This is, once again, _not_ your Captain speaking,” Molly’s voice interrupts. “We have reached our first destination. We at Mollymauk Air hope you had a pleasant ride and, if you didn’t, I’m not interested in hearing it. Have a nice day.”

 

& & & &

 

The kitchen had turned into a place of comfort. All seven of them were in there, on the stools or—in Beau and Yasha’s case—sitting on the table and leaning up against the counter, all with mugs of coffee, steam wafting. _A family meeting_ , Fjord had called it. The list that Jester had scribbled in pen is still there, smudged slightly from a spill that someone had tried to sloppily clean and he stares at the words, upside-down.

Right before they had all gathered, Fjord had stopped in the cockpit and searched through window after window on the console until he found the log, the list of what programs had been turned on when but not by whom, scrolled up and up and up, kept expecting to see _sonic pulse emitter activated_ next to a timestamp a few seconds before the creature attacked. It was him. It _had_ to be him. He finds it but it’s earlier, much _much_ earlier, right around the same time that he’d taken them out of the trench and turned them around.

_SONIC PULSE EMITTER ACTIVATED: REMOTE ACCESS GRANTED._

It seemed like an unbelievable oversight and he’d double— _triple_ —checked but there it was. _Remote access granted._ He’d think that they had left it there on purpose, same as how they subtly revealed the fact that they were tracking them. _We have more control than you think. We always have._

“I’m just saying,” Jester says and Fjord brings himself back into their conversation, “It must have been one _really_ big ship that got sent down here.”

“Or it was a lot of different ships. A whole bunch of different crews,” Beau suggests, which was exactly what Fjord had thought when he saw it.

“But it was so many,” Jester says. “Wouldn’t we have heard about that?”

“People go missing all the time up in space,” Fjord tells her. “It doesn’t get talked about much.” He’d heard the stories while working cargo: ships going out for routine excursions and never coming back, joyrides that became one-way trips, shuttles being found floating and empty. A few of them were suicides but a fair amount of others were not. They just disappeared. There were entire websites devoted to trying to find them, people taking time off work to fly their cruiser or their shuttle past the border to search with expert or homemade devices. As far as Fjord was aware, nobody had ever been found.

“It is the same here, in the ocean,” Caleb says. Fjord didn’t doubt that. Down here might as well just be another version of outer space; it just wasn’t infinite.

“This could have been happening for a long time,” Beau says. “Over the course of, like, you know. Years. And L&N, they had to know, right? Probably aren’t a lot of ocean exploration people out there, sending people down here.”

“Of course they knew,” Molly says.

“So they knew something was happening down here,” Beau continues, “But they hid it.” They buried it because who the hell would sign on to explore the ocean—scientist or not—if they knew how many of their predecessors had vanished under their employer’s watch. _You’ll make some discoveries, but you also might not come home._

“You know what I bet? I bet they knew about this thing.”

“So why kill it now?” Yasha asks. If what Beau was suggesting was true, then what had changed?

“They had proof,” Caleb says, after a momentary hush. Of course. How could he forget? The catalyst. The video. The _Johnsonii_ crew calling for help, the creature visible through the window as it attacked. It was validation: there was _something_ down there. If L &N had the video, then it was possible for someone else to get it, too. Hackers were everywhere. You could buy the best protection around and they’d still find a way to get in. Someone would take it, they would watch it. Connections would get made, and a few strands of those connections would likely lead right back to L&N. It was why they left so quickly. Why they had disembarked from such a strange, out-of-the-way location, abandoned and drone-free. “They realize they’re in trouble, they send a bunch of nobodies to go after it.”

Fjord had suspected since the beginning that they hadn’t set out to hire the best. They wanted a bunch of strangers looking for somewhere to go, something _to do_ , that they probably figured no one would miss if the whole thing had gone awry.

“Fuck these guys,” Beau says.

“Here, here,” Molly says, lifts his mug in a sort of salute before taking a drink from it.

“Since we’re sitting here, being angry at Lebedev-Narita, I feel obligated to tell you that they were the ones who turned on the emitter.” Truthfully, he had no _certain_ evidence that that was true—it was still possible it could have been someone here who had accessed it remotely but he didn’t want to believe that. They’d all seen what it had done to the others. Why would any of them want to invite that? (Even if they _did_ all know now that they had the weaponry to take care of it.)

“Are you serious?” Beau asks at the same time Yasha questions: “How do you know?”

“Says so in the logs. ‘Remote access granted’. Turned on right around the time I started taking us home.”

“They tried to kill us?” Jester asks. “They _sent_ it to us?”

“Like they did with the _Johnsonii_ ,” Nott says. “Except we could defend ourselves.”

“But if that’s true… If they did that both times, on purpose… If the first time was some sort of experiment or… Or a _test_. To draw the creature out… I don’t know.” Yasha says, stops talking.

“What is it?” Fjord encourages.

“Well. Why not just delete the video? Pretend it didn’t happen. Like the others?” Another break in the discussion. Fjord was starting to feel as if they were reading something important with every other paragraph blacked out. They were putting some of the pieces together, they understood _parts_ of it but there was one major question still hanging over their heads and the answers were on a whole other planet: _Why?_ He wasn’t sure, if they had been honest from the start, that he would have agreed to be down here, but they hadn’t given him the option to consider it. It made sense now, though, why they had him take the job before they told him what it was; even with the lies, this information getting out was trouble.

 _My boss has her concerns about the situation,_ the man with the glasses had also told him, _very vocal concerns. This creature poses a serious risk to many, many people._ They just hadn’t specified _which_ people those were and now, Fjord is realizing, they probably meant themselves. What was it that Beau had said earlier? _Companies are only ever in anything for themselves. To protect their own asses._

“You all talk far too much,” Molly says, “I’m all for a healthy discussion of the ‘how’s and ‘why’s of this whole situation, and I know I’m starting to sound like a broken audio recording, but I’d feel much better about having it while we’re not sitting in the middle of the ocean in a ship that, might I remind you, still has an uninvited guest living rent-free in our walls.” He looks to Fjord. “And in our friend.”

“Molly’s right,” Jester says. “We need to get out of here.”

“I say we take their ship and make a run for it. Just dump it somewhere, make ‘em waste time looking for it,” Beau says.

“Great. And where would you like to take it?” Molly sits forward, folds his hands together. Beau doesn’t answer, grimaces at him instead. “Exactly. Besides, I don’t want to be responsible if this thing somehow escapes and starts worming its way into innocent people. Because L&N may have done a lot of terrible, terrible things but that would definitely be our fault. And I wouldn’t be happy living with that. Would you?”

“So what are you suggesting? We run right into their open arms?” Beau asks.

“Going back to where we started is certainly less conspicuous,” Caleb says. “And I’m not sure how, uh... comfortable I am going anywhere else in a ship that may fall apart around us while we use it. Two days may already be pushing it.” _Piloted_ , Fjord thinks, _by a guy that might do the exact same thing_.

“We deliver the ship to them, tell them what’s wrong with it, let them have it. I may not trust them as far as I can throw them, but they’re intent on keeping everything that’s happened down here a secret. They don’t seem like the ‘release the monster into the public’ types. With any luck, they’ll blow it up. And then it will be _no one’s_ problem. We ask them nicely to let us leave and, if they say no, we leave anyway,” Molly says. “Damn the consequences.” They discuss it for another twenty minutes, reach a stalemate and then discuss it more, Nott, at one point, offering to construct an explosive using parts salvaged from the ship to just send it sky high themselves once they were on land again. It almost seems as if a few of them were going to agree but Fjord shuts it down. _We are not_ , he says, _blowing anything up_. Besides, he felt it ridiculous that he needed to remind them how sturdy this vessel was; he doubted Nott could build something more powerful than a nuke out of scraps.

There’s a lull, all of them focusing on their coffees, letting the tense air in the room settle.

“What about your sample?” Fjord asks, suddenly remembering it after letting his mind wander. “Did it make it?” If _that_ was gone, then maybe the rest of it was, too. Maybe Jester had been right: kill the source, kill the rest.

“It is dead,” Caleb says and Fjord is allowed a millisecond of hopefulness before he follows with: “But I believe it was dead when we found it. It is possible it was never even alive to begin with.”

“What was inside it?” Jester asks.

“Teeth, mostly,” Caleb replies.

“Gross,” Jester says, face screwing up with disgust but then, after a pause: “Can I see it?”

“Maybe later.” She sighs, disappointed, but accepting.

“So that’s it then. That’s the plan,” Fjord says. “We’re all in agreement.” They stare at one another, searching faces, all looking for something different and perhaps finding it, perhaps not. Fjord takes their silence as approval, stands up and takes his coffee with him as he makes his way to where he’ll be stuck for almost forty-eight hours straight.

A dull throb starts in his head without warning and, quietly, as he ascends the ladder, a woman starts to sing.

_I rode my b-bicycle past your window last night…_

 

& & & &

 

Fjord starts to limp them home. He powers down everything unnecessary, permanently moves navigation control over to himself and, until they climb up out of the water, it’s just him, the map, and an invisible steering wheel. The window has been uncovered, the lights on low, and he watches the sand and terrain go by; if he doesn’t focus on it, if he stares at the blackness ahead, it’s almost as if they’re in space, the tiny creatures floating in the ocean the stars. There’s a peacefulness that it gives him, but not as much as he would hope. Not as much as it used to.

He rubs a thumb against his temple, exhales slowly. _Just don’t let it get worse until after I get these people home._

He’s only been sitting there for a couple hours when the door opens and he glances over his shoulder, sees Molly walk in. He’s wearing a bright purple scarf that Fjord hadn’t seen on him during any of the time they had spent together and he puts his hands behind his back, stares ahead, saying nothing.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Fjord says after letting the silence linger for a moment.

“Stand here?”

“Go with me, once we’re out of the water. To get my head fixed.” He makes a few adjustments on the screen in front of him and the _Bathynomus_ makes a slight turn to the right. “None of you do.”

“Nonsense,” Molly says. “It’s always better to keep the people who know your secrets where you can see them.”

“Right. Of course.”

“We’re a crew now, aren’t we? Where else would I go?” Molly asks. Fjord doesn’t respond because he’s not sure if Molly had been asking him or himself. He expects that to be the end of it, that Molly had just stopped by for no particular reason but he doesn’t leave. “I brought something for you.”

“You did?”

“Mhm.” Molly turns towards him, slides the scarf off from around his neck. The fabric is light and thin and it has a shine to it under the white lights.

“I don’t think that’s my color,” Fjord says and Molly laughs, a _ha ha_ that sounded entirely faked. He crouches down beside Fjord, nods to his right arm.

“Spare that a moment?” They weren’t in a particularly rough spot and, for the next few minutes, it was a bit of a straight-shot until Fjord would likely need to make a course correction. The _Bathynomus_ had started to drift to the left every now and then but he wasn’t sure if it had always been that way and the internal computers took care of it or if the alien was messing with the ship instead, same as it had started again with him, too. Ripping apart the big one must have simply startled it, disoriented it, and now they were waking up. He pulls the hand away from the screen, leans his arm against the curved portion that acted as an armrest.

Molly takes his wrist, turns his arm so it’s palm-up, pushes the sleeve until it’s at his elbow, at the section when metal disappeared under acid-burned artificial skin. He starts at the top, works his way down, winding the scarf around him.

“Jester said she was out of Second Skin and we can’t have you waving this around once we face the inquisition,” Molly says. Fjord turns his attention away from the window, stares at him, at his hands as they loop the fabric tightly over his limb. “Long sleeves can only hide so much.” He finishes, pulls a piece of duct tape from the inside of his coat and uses it to keep the scarf in place. “One more.” Another, this one a paler purple, comes out from a pocket. He’s half-way through wrapping it when he finally seems to notice that Fjord’s been watching him. He stops, tilts his head just slightly.

Molly puts his hand in Fjord’s uncovered one, threads his fingers between the metal ones, curls his fingers down and rubs his thumb against the side of Fjord’s index finger. He feels it, sort of, knows at least that that its _his_ hand and there’s something there. He watches this for a few seconds, lets it happen, and then takes his hand away because he felt that anxiety again, that _dread_. That hand is not him. That can’t really _be him._

“I’m sorry,” Fjord hears himself say. Whatever this is, he can’t— He _can’t_. Not when he sees himself like this still, not when he doesn’t even know if he’s a _person_ anymore. Not with an alien in his head, and pain, and music that won’t leave him alone and thoughts that were starting to glitch on him again. _It’s not you_ , he wants to say, as cliche as it is, _it’s me_.

“Don’t be,” Molly says, continues wrapping the second scarf around him. Fjord tries to listen for a hurt, an anger at him pulling away, but he doesn’t hear it. “I can wait.” He finishes in silence, tapes the scarf down. “One last thing.” He reaches into the same pocket (reaches with the hand that had been in Fjord’s and he can still feel it somehow, the ghost of it) and pulls out a leather glove.

“Why do you have that?” Fjord asks but Molly simply smiles at him instead of responding. It doesn’t quite fit but it works well enough. Someone would really have to be purposely looking for something not quite right to notice and—if they did—they probably already knew what they were looking for.

“Well.” Molly brushes his hands together, studies his handiwork before pushing himself back up to his full height. “That’ll do.” A glance out the window. “I’ll leave you to your work.” _You d-don’t have to go_ , Fjord thinks, says, instead: “S-sure.” Molly was almost to the door but Fjord listens as his footsteps come to a standstill.

“How often?” Molly inquires.

“What do you mean?”

“How often do you want someone to check on you?” Molly explains, stretching out the question. He heard it. Of course he did.

“I’ll be fine.”

“That didn’t sound like a number,” Molly says, but it’s not threatening. A gentle admonishment. He hadn’t wanted any of them to know. To worry. He hadn’t wanted it the first time either, but the music had been too loud, he couldn’t _ignore_ it. The malfunctioning in his words, the stuttering, wasn’t something he could hide. No matter what, they would have found out eventually. Just like now.

“Every four,” Fjord says in the end.

“Three, you said?” Molly asks.

“Yeah,” Fjord says, even though they were both well aware that that _wasn’t_ what he had said, “Three.”

“I’ll see you in three hours then,” Molly replies and then saunters out, leaving Fjord alone with his slowly malfunctioning thoughts. The ship starts to drift and he lets it for a moment, before correcting the course.

 

& & & &

 

Three hours later, Molly comes back, just as he said he would, talks to him instead of asking how he was doing and Fjord knows that he’s trying to hear his voice, hear how frequently his verbal glitches pervade their conversation, but he finds that he doesn’t entirely mind. He still _click clicks_ when he talks, but it’s already become barely perceptible anymore. It would be to the people who were waiting for them when they got back, they’d hear it when they asked him to explain what happened. But that wasn’t a problem that could be wrapped with a scarf or that he wanted Nott rummaging around trying to fix.

Jester shows up after Molly and Fjord wonders if they were volunteering or had decided to pull straws, the next shortest being the one to have to climb up here and make sure he hasn’t completely lost it yet. She babbles at him, rambles about what the others were doing while he was isolated in the cockpit and most of it goes in one ear, out the other, but he’s grateful at least that the rest of the ship wasn’t on fire.

Beau brings him a cup and a plate, promises him that Molly had made it so it was edible enough to tide him over and then sits up on the edge of the console, careful not to get her legs in the way.

“Hey so, uh, you remember awhile ago? When I said ‘robot’s are fuckin’ creepy’? I’m. Well. I didn’t know. It was stupid.” She’s trying to apologize.

“It’s alright,” Fjord says. “Like you said: you— you didn’t know.”

“I mean, neither did you. So we both didn’t know it was an insult.” She pauses. “You probably didn’t even remember I said it. Probably shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“W-we really need to work on your apo— apologies,” Fjord says.

“It’s getting bad again, huh?”

“I can get us back,” Fjord says, figures that’s what she’s concerned about.

“You’re sure? Because if you start freezing up… or something else starts going on…”

“Then I guess I’ll give nav back to the ship and we hope it gets us there in one piece,” Fjord says. Beau grunts at him and he can’t tell if she’s happy with that answer or not.

 

& & & &

 

He jolts awake at the sound of the door closing. He hadn’t even realized he’d fallen asleep, didn’t think he _could_ and he rubs a hand over his face, checks the console but they hadn’t strayed.

“Sorry,” he hears Yasha whisper. She must have been coming in, which meant he’d only dozed for three hours. There were no dreams; just empty black, the sound of his own voice murmuring accentless at him, the words faltering, stumbling, as if there was another version of himself that was trying to tell him a story but he couldn’t make it make sense. “Are you… Hm. Are you doing alright?”

“Hangin’ in there,” Fjord replies and that’s the end of their interaction. She stays for a good twenty minutes, watching him, just keeping him company and then, when she’s done, she gives him another one of her awkward bows without uncrossing her arms and leaves.

 

& & & &

 

Nott stares him down, eyes narrowed, as if waiting for him to do something but, when he doesn’t, she approaches one of the screens, says that she needs to _check a couple of things_ and starts typing, scrolling through windows. She does this for a few minutes before closing everything and walking out and Fjord wonders if she hadn’t been doing anything at all but needed a distraction so she didn’t feel so strange.

After another three hours, he expects to hear Caleb coming in but nothing happens. He waits and waits. Five minutes past the time he was supposed to show goes by and then he hears it: a _tap tap tap_ at the door. Abandoning his chair for a moment, he gets up and opens it, regards Frumpkin as he comes wandering in, sliding past Fjord’s legs. He’s not hissing at him, not giving him an evil eye, and he jumps up to the same spot that Beau had sat earlier and sits down. His tail twitches.

“Ah,” Fjord says, returning to his seat. This _was_ Caleb, watching him through Frumpkin’s eyes.

Despite the fact that he didn’t show in person, Caleb stays with Fjord the longest out of everyone, uses Frumpkin to sit with him for almost an hour and a half, curled up, chin resting on a paw, eyes never closing.

 

& & & &

 

_I’ve got a— got a— got— got— we should get together and— you’ve g-got something for me—_

_You’ve got something for me._

_You’ve got something I need._

Fjord is in the void. Trapped, unmoving.

“Broken,” the eye says to him.

“I c— I can be f-fixed,” Fjord says.

“Watching.”

_You’ve— You’ve— You’ve got a brand new_

 

_key._

 

& & & &

 

Fjord stops the _Bathynomus_. All they have left is to go up.

The others had been in and out, in a random order every three hours over the past two days, just as they said they would. He’d only fallen asleep one other time, his mind plagued with incoherence, and he’d woken up to Molly standing behind his chair, hands on either side of his head as if trying to hold it in place (carefully though, his thumbs pressed against his hairline), Fjord’s own mouth spouting out the same glitchy, irrational gibbering he had been dreaming about. Molly had let go of him once he was conscious and alert again, and Fjord took a few deep breaths, leaned forward to nudge the ship back in the right direction.

“Few— Few more hours,” Fjord had said. He glanced back at Molly, then, swallowed hard. Cleared his clicking throat. “I’ll get us there.” Just kept assuring them because, if he did, it had to be true.

Now here they were. Another hour and a half from the surface, forty minutes if he pushed it, and then, from there, it was a matter of lowering the legs from the underbelly and walking them up the slope and parking it up against the dock. _T-time to fa— face the music_ , he thinks.

He opens up shipwide communications for the last time, tries to say something but changes his mind, closes it again just as the door opens and Molly walks in. He nods to the console and Fjord reopens the line.

“This is, as I’m sure you’re aware, _not_ your Captain speaking,” Molly says. “We are only a short time away from our final destination. Before we make our final ascent, please talk to any god you can, make sure your guns are fully loaded, and don’t worry about fastening your seatbelts because we’ve never had them in the first place. We here at Mollymauk Air thank you for your mandatory cooperation.” He leans over Fjord and shuts the channel off. “Now, what was it you said before?” He thinks about it for a couple seconds. “Ah, right. Yeehaw.”

And then Fjord turns off the lights and starts to rise.

 

& & & &

 

“They can’t see in, can they?” Nott asks. Everyone was crowded in the cockpit, their bags slung over their shoulders. Molly and Yasha have their guns out, Yasha holding both her own and Fjord’s, just until he was ready to take it for himself. He’d brought the _Bathynomus_ up to the same rickety, time-worn dock that they’d departed from less than a week ago, the neglected warehouses crammed together, stretched out in front of them. But, between the water’s edge and the buildings, was a group of people in suits, most of them unrecognizable except for Stodiana, Elva, and, oddly enough, the still nameless man with the glasses and moustache and every single one of them was staring right at the ship.

“No,” Fjord says. The seven of them stare right back.

“Still not too late to back it up and leave,” Beau says. “Although, it _has_ been awhile since I’ve kicked anyone’s ass. I’m getting kinda itchy.”

“No asses will be kicked,” Molly says. “Unless they provoke it.” _Provoke._ _Provoke._ Fjord lowers the shielding over the window just because he can, as if he thought that might say something and then, taking in a slow inhale, exhale, he stands up, holds out his gloved hand and feels Yasha put his Falchion in it. He puts his other hand on the console and opens the door.

He pushes through them, goes to be the first one out but Yasha holds up her arm, stopping him. Rolling her shoulders—her ombre hair shaking with her movements—she steps outside, boots thudding heavy against synthetic wood. Molly follows, then Jester and Beau, finally Fjord, Nott and Caleb (and Frumpkin) bringing up the rear. Fjord makes it a few steps but then his left leg locks, twists strangely. _Not n-now, not— not—_ He’s fuzzy. He blinks and his vision dims and brightens. There’s a hand on the back of his shoulder, light, just barely there, and he turns his head, sees Caleb pulling the same hand away. He starts to move.

The sky is that pale, yellow-grey of early morning in a place where the sun rarely shines and the air smells like salt and decay blowing in from the water behind them, sending a tremor through the kudzu still growing through the cracks in the dull pavement. He hears shuttles roaring in the distance. Up here, nothing had changed and, for a moment, it was overwhelming. He could dive into the water right now, sink to the bottom and swim. But he knows that he won’t. His grip tightens on his Falchion and he’s unsure if it was his own choice or the alien in his head and he switches hands, puts the damaged one in the pocket of his jacket.

He should say something. _Somebody_ had to say something.

“Good morning,” Caleb, of all people, calls out. There’s a stretch of ground between the two groups but not nearly enough to make them comfortable. He walks forward, but makes sure to keep a few people in front of him, as if using them as a shield, speaking through the space between their bodies. His hands are up. Placating. “We are armed, yes. But we are not looking for a fight.”

“We lost communication with you for more than three days,” Stodiana says.

“That is true,” Caleb says.

“And the tracker,” she says, unfolds her arms to show them a small device, a green dot flashing on the screen, not denying that there was one on their ship, “Says you’re still at the bottom of the ocean. I’m very interested to have this explained.” Caleb takes a breath in through his nose, lifts his head slightly, chin pointing in her direction and he lowers his hands, but only somewhat. If they gave them the partial truth, gave them enough to chew on, then the rest of it would seem inconsequential.

“We found the _Johnsonii_ but the crew was gone. They were mutated… reconstructed into some other animal, likely by the creature that you sent us to go after. It was brought on board and there were complications,” Caleb explains, speaks calmly and slowly. _We’re no danger to you. We were just trying to make best out of a bad situation._ “It had to be put down but it did not die as we assumed it had and, somehow, it got into the ship.”

“ _Into_ the ship,” Stodiana repeats.

“Yes. It damaged our ability to communicate with you and it was not something we had the tools to be able to repair. We saw our only option was to return before things got much worse,” Caleb says and Stodiana stares at him, at all of them, and Fjord feels her gaze linger on him before shifting to somewhere behind them and she nods, gesturing with her chin.

“And why does the ship look like that?” She asks. They turn. This is the first time Fjord is seeing the outside of the ship in natural light after they had been attacked; there’s a dent in one side from where they had been repeatedly slammed into and the sleek black paint was worn off in huge patches, exposing the brushed steel-like hull underneath. Fjord was doubtful that it could have withstood the nuke that they claimed it could but it didn’t look nearly as in bad of a shape as her question made it sound.

“You _know_ why,” Beau snaps, reaches into her bag and pulls out the SPE, tossing it underhand, and Stodiana watches it bounce and roll along the ground, stopping it with the bottom of her shoe once it reaches her.

“Well. You got me there,” Stodiana says when she looks back up. “We lost communication. We saw you leaving the trench and then going we didn’t know where. Going _somewhere_ without our input. I— _We_ thought you were abandoning the mission.” The way she speaks, the way she spells it all out, sounds as if she’s practicing for a room of lawyers. “So we may have… intervened in order to make sure you finished it.” A pause. “Did you?”

“Yes,” Caleb says, “We—”

“I’m not asking you,” Stodiana says, interrupting him, and she looks pointedly at Fjord. _She— She can’t know. It’s— It— It’s because I’m the Cap— I’m the Captain._ He coughs, clears his throat. If he talks, it’s all over. Unlike his legs not responding properly, the stutters and clicks when he speaks isn’t something he can forcibly stop, power through. If he says nothing, it could be just as bad. He has to make a choice.

“Yes,” Fjord says. _Click click._

“That’s it?” Stodiana asks. “Just ‘yes’.”

“It’s dead,” Fjord says. _Keep it together. J-just keep— keep it together._ His brain is in shambles. He’s using every ounce of energy to focus on _not messing up_. Stodiana takes one step forward, two steps, leans in slightly, her eyes narrowed. She heard it. _She heard— She heard it._

“Look,” Molly says, stepping in front of Fjord, “We just want to get out of here. You can have your ship and all the mess on it. It’s yours. What happened here will stay between you and us. I promise. We signed agreements. We plan on honoring those. But we’re done.” There’s a lengthy, pregnant pause when he finishes talking. A gull appears from out of nowhere, flies over them, laughing, wings tilted as it sways towards the horizon. Stodiana starts to drum her fingers on her thigh, the fabric of her suit pants wrinkling with each tap. Her hand stills.

“You said the… let’s call it an alien. You said the alien got into the ship. Is that right?” _Let’s call it an alien_. As if they didn’t already know. Eyes on Fjord. She’s asking him.

“Yes. Th— That’s correct.” He stumbled. The sunlight, hidden behind clouds, is somehow making his head hurt worse. He curls the fingers on his gloved hand into a fist, feels the metal pushing into his palm.

“Doesn’t that mean it could have gotten somewhere else?” She queries. “Maybe in one of you.”

“No. That’s not possible. We would know,” Jester says. “Everyone is fine.”

“See, I don’t think that’s true. Is it Fjord?” When she says it, Fjord gets the sickening feeling of his stomach dropping down to his feet. It hits him so hard it makes him dizzy and it takes all his effort to maintain a straight face. She was guessing. She had to be. He was acting strange but she didn’t know why and she was hoping to trip him up, make him nervous enough about what she was planning on doing that he’d tell her anything she wanted to know, including the truth. He grinds his back teeth as he keeps his mouth shut.

“Hm. Well, if that’s the case...” Stodiana takes one last step forward, folds her hands together. “Lebedev-Narita and its associates are grateful for the service you provided to us and the families of the _Johnsonii_ crew. You have truly brought something fascinating to us. Unfortunately, I have concerns that one, or possibly more, of you have been infected by what you found down there. And, after what Mister Widogast described, I can’t risk exposing that to the public. I’m going to have to quarantine you. _All_ of you.” Out of the corner of his eye, Fjord sees Caleb freeze, the expression on his face settling in something _cold_ and Nott takes his hand.

“Quarantine?” Jester asks. “For how long?”

“Indefinitely. We can’t have you—”

“This is bullshit,” Beau says. “You don’t think we’re _infected_. You just want us out of the way. I don’t think you even have the authority to do something like this.”

“Oh. But I do. And even if that were true, that I was just ‘getting you out of the way’... So what? You solved a problem for us but it’s a problem no one can know about. And we need to make sure that it stays that way.”

“I told you. It will,” Molly says.

“Don’t be offended,” Stodiana says, “If I don’t take you at your word.” Fjord finds himself glancing at Elva, sees her looking perturbed. Uneasy. Either it was a stellar performance, or she had no idea this was the direction the morning was going to go in. The latter could work in their favor, as long as she wasn’t too afraid of Stodiana to undermine her.

Even if Stodiana didn’t actually quarantine them and simply kept them separated somewhere, locked away and sitting on their hands until they proved they were willing to comply with _keep your lips sealed or else_ —if she was ever really planning on letting them go at all—the truth would out. He was deteriorating by the minute, certainly not as fast as he had been when the creature was right beside them, making the alien in his head dance like a marionette without any strings but still enough that he would be singled out. He’d be interrogated. He’d be sent to a doctor or a hospital or, worst case, they would wait for him to die. Or, even worse than that, wait until they _thought_ he was dead and then pull him apart. They might let his new friends go but they’d never let _him_ go.

Before the men and women in suits that Stodiana had flanking her could even twitch, Yasha—in one swift motion—has her gun raised and points it directly at the Halfling.

“Please. Don’t make me laugh. You won’t kill me. I’m unarmed. They, on the other hand, are not. And there’s far more of them than there are of you.” She makes a whistling noise between her teeth and eight pairs of hands pull out eight pistols. The only ones who don’t are Stodiana and Elva, who walks a few feet backwards, slowly, her head shaking.

“Can I just— Just ask o-one thi— thing?” Fjord inquires, doesn’t bother trying to hide it. They were either getting out of here or they weren’t; either way, attempting to pretend nothing was wrong anymore was pointless. He doesn’t wait for her to acknowledge him. “Was— Was there anythi— anything we could have said that— that— that w-would have con— convinced you to let— let— let— us go?” If things had gone exactly according to plan, if they had followed their orders, killed the creature and come home, would that have changed anything? Or was this always how it was going to end. The papers they signed were meaningless. Their dissent, their close encounter with the alien, was just a much better excuse than whatever they had planned.

“No.” Stodiana responds but, before she could continue, Yasha points the barrel of her gun in the air, fires it once into the sky, the blue light travelling up and up and up and then dissipating into the clouds. The sound of it echoes around them long after it ended. She returns it to its earlier position. Stodiana smiles. “You don’t scare me.”

“Does this count as being provoked?” Beau asks.

“I suppose so,” Molly concedes.

“Cool,” Beau says and then runs forward with surprising speed, bounces up on her toes, reels her arm back and slams an uppercut into Stodiana’s stomach, lands another solid punch to the side of her head as she’s doubled-over. She immediately goes down. Beau gives her a kick to the jaw. Without direction, the seven other no names in suits look confused, as if they were physically unable to react without direction. The round man with the moustache, on the other hand, his glasses falling down his nose, has no qualms about firing and lifts his pistol, focuses on the woman who had just knocked down his boss.

 _BAM._ The shot goes off. Beau sees it coming and tries to move to avoid it but it hits her in the arm anyway, slicing across her upper arm.

 _BAM._ He fires again but he misses. A different target, Jester this time, and she ducks as the _crack_ of gunfire comes for her, the bullet scraping against one of her horns. The group scatters, all except for Fjord, whose legs have locked him in place, whose head was too disorganized, his thoughts running backwards, entire words forgotten, _glitch— glitching._ The man seems to realize, finally, that Fjord isn’t a moving target and he aims at him; Fjord tries to lift his Falchion but he’s too slow, he _knows_ he’s too slow.

“Stop!” Elva yells, starts running forward. “Roy! Enough!” She’s right by him now, reaches out and tries to grab at his arms, push them down but he fights her.

“There’s something wrong with him!” The man now with a name— _Roy_ —all but shouts back, doesn’t tear his gaze away from Fjord.

“It doesn’t matter,” Elva says. “We’re letting them go, alright?” When she says that, she glances at the seven suits. _That goes for you, too._ “Alright?” She looks back at Roy, asks it as evenly as she could manage. Roy starts to lower his gun, drop his arms, his heavy breathing losing steam. Fjord closes his eyes, lets out a gradual breath but he opens his eyes again when he hears Elva cry out “No!” and Roy has his pistol pointed at Fjord again, his finger on the trigger. Three, two— _Thunk._ Something long and sharp, stained black, sticks deep into Roy’s thigh. Roy blinks, frowning, and peers down at the arrow now buried in him, lifts his head and tries to search for where it had come from, eyes finally landing on Nott, who was peering out around Yasha’s legs, a strange-looking weapon in her hand. The place that she hit starts bleeding and Roy continues to merely blink.

“What the—?” He starts to say, drops his arms but doesn’t let go of the gun. _Thunk._ A second arrow, right in his shoulder. “Oh.” The pistol clatters to the ground and Roy soon follows, lands hard on his rear, sitting there, almost bewildered at what had just happened.

“Dude,” Beau says, “What the hell is that?”

“Crossbow,” Nott replies. “I was starting to think I’d never get to use it.” The people in their suits start to raise their own weapons but Elva steps out in front of them, hands up much in the same way Caleb had approached them minutes earlier.

“No,” she says. “Do not— Don’t. We’re letting them go,” she repeats. For a second it seems as if they didn’t plan on listening to her, gazes flickering to the currently unmoving form of their boss, the dumbfounded figure of Roy, but then their arms relax, just enough to show they weren’t a threat but they damn well would be ready if they had to—which Fjord sincerely hoped that they didn’t. “Please.” She turns, talking to the seven of _them_ as if she’s afraid. He doesn’t want that. “I didn’t— I didn’t know she was going to do that. I didn’t know they had guns. At least believe that.”

“You’re really going to let us go?” Jester asks.

“Yes. As far as I’m concerned, you did what we asked. Your job is done. Whatever is going on, it’s not my problem. This”—She points to Stodiana, gestures to the ship—“Is my problem right now. I’ll do what I can to keep them off your back but you have to go. _Now_ ,” she adds when they don’t move right away. They all start to walk forward except for Fjord. _Except f-for me. Be— Because I can’t._

“Jester,” he says because she’s closer, she’s who he sees first, and she immediately turns, returns to his side.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” She asks quietly, holds her arms up. _Do you need me to carry you?_ Fjord glances at Elva, who’s watching them in return. Her eyes are wide, the sense of urgency coming off her, almost visible like heat waves from scorching asphalt.

“Pre— Pretend like we’re— we’re t-talking,” Fjord says.

“Well, we already are but okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“I— I don’t kn— know. But I need— need you to— to give me a pu— push.” His legs have locked but maybe if his body feels itself falling it’ll somehow correct itself, like Fjord redirecting the course of the _Bathynomus_ when it started drifting to the left. Just an outside force reminding it: _no, go this way._ Jester gets behind him, reaches up both hands and then says, as she shoves him: “Hey-ho, let’s go Fjord-e-o!” The top half of him starts to topple and, just as he thinks that maybe he’d hit the ground anyway—or (even worse than that) his back would snap as he bent forward, arms flailing—his legs seem to go _oh, right, we’re supposed to be doing something_ and flounder a bit, scuffing against the concrete before managing to help him keep his balance. Jester catches him by the elbow to steady him.

Yasha leads them past the seven suits, heading towards the same building where they had been dropped off and first put on their L&N coveralls, their identities and belongings checked at the door. He had no idea what they would find in there; most of them had been driven in company vehicles, everyone except for Yasha, who’d shown in her own beat-up shuttle, but Fjord couldn’t remember how big it was, if it could even fit everyone. _Everyone_. It was almost baffling, knowing that these people were willing to help smuggle him somewhere, keep his secret when it would be just as easy for them to tell the first person they saw, for them to turn around and say something _right now_. But they don’t.

“Wait!” They hear Elva shout and they stop, think that she’s talking to them. “Wait, wait, wait, don’t!” _BANG._ There’s a deafening silence to follow the ear-ringing gunshot and they look down at themselves, checking each other because it was one them, it _had_ to be one of them except, other than the wound that was already on Beau’s arm, they were unharmed. And that’s when they turn to see Elva, holding a hand to her side, Stodiana still on the ground, blood and saliva dripping from a dislocated jaw, her arms raised, Roy’s gun clutched in her hands.

“Elva!” Jester calls out, starts to run back to her and Stodiana takes that as a chance to aim at her, tries to say something but it comes out as mumbled gibberish. Caleb snaps his fingers and Frumpkin comes out of nowhere, jumps, claws out towards Stodiana, starts tearing at her face, just enough of a distraction for Jester to be able to make it to Elva. She slings an arm around her shoulder and starts leading her towards the rest of them. There’s a crash, a _shatter_ and Frumpkin goes bouncing, tumbling, before he stops. He stands and staggers but then, remarkably, runs back to Caleb, who bends down to scoop him up, deposit him into his bag.

 _BANG._ Another one and it goes wild. Stodiana doesn’t bother trying to stand and they start to run because she had to come up empty soon and as long as she kept missing it wouldn’t matter much longer, they didn’t want to stand around and hope that the seven other people with handguns would continue to stand there, doing nothing, now that the person in charge was alert, struggling to give orders. _BANG._

“Alright,” Molly says, swiveling on his heels, pulling out on his glowing pistols. “We tried.” They’d tried to talk their way out. They _tried_ to be civil. “That’s enough of that.” The door, thankfully, isn’t locked and Yasha hauls it open, steps aside to let Jester and Elva through first and then Fjord, the rest of them, and all Fjord can hear is the whine of Molly’s gun going off, a cry and then nothing. He’s the last one in, closes the door behind him. There’s a keyhole but no key. ( _You— you’ve got— got— got— a brand— br— brand new key._ ) There’s nothing stopping the rest of the bodies outside from chasing after them.

The table they had used to check in, thudding their bags down on, is still there and Yasha puts her gun down on it, grips the side and pushes it up against the door. It wouldn’t do much, but it would help enough. It would buy them time.

“Did you kill her?” Nott asks.

“If she doesn’t get any help in the next, oh, I don’t know,” Molly checks an invisible watch on his wrist, “Hour? Then yes. I did.”

“Should have killed her,” Nott says. The interior of the warehouse seems somehow more massive than Fjord remembered it being only a few days ago, more desolate and run-down. Or maybe he was just projecting. The only light is spilling in from papered-over and cracked windows high up on the lofty walls and it barely illuminates anything, giving the space the look as if time passed much slower in here and it was still not quite morning yet. There are three vehicles in here: two sleek white cruisers, all curved lines and rounded edges, likely not the same ones that had taken them here but definitely from the same place, and Yasha’s battered shuttle.

“I can’t get everyone in there,” Yasha says.

“Anyone know how to steal a cruiser?” Molly asks.

“I, uh… I _could_ ,” Beau confesses. “But I haven’t done it in awhile.” The closed door opens, hits against the table and, immediately, someone starts slamming against the door, trying to nudge the blockade to get it to move just enough that they could squeeze through. _WHAM. WHAM. WHAM._ Fjord’s suddenly back on the _Bathynomus_ , the creature bashing itself against the hull, the alarm going off— _wheeum, wheeum, wheeum_ —and then he’s on the _Catterick_ — _wheeum wheeum_ —he’s on the floor, there’s a hole in the ceiling and someone is falling down towards him—

“Fjord!” He blinks and he’s back in the warehouse again. He’s not _back_. He never left. His brain just— “Fjord!” It’s Jester yelling, but Molly is the one to grab his hand. That wasn’t him. He was stronger than that. He’d gone a whole year without letting what happened bother him, if he ignored how difficult it was for him to sleep, the vague nightmares that were mostly shadows, blobs moving in a fog or, sometimes nothing at all. It was just the alien.

“Keep it together,” Molly is saying, pulls on him lightly, but it’s not mean-spirited. The others were already a few feet ahead and he expects to see them stop at Yasha’s shuttle but they keep going, heading for a small office just past it. _WHAM._ The legs of the table grind against the floor, groaning. A cloud moves over the window, darkening the room but then Fjord realizes it’s not a cloud, it’s his vision. He pitches forward slightly but manages to wake himself back up. _WHAM._ There’s shouting, overlapping, angry chatter and Fjord supposes that actively _shooting_ Stodiana was the last straw. Either that, or she’d finally been able to tell them what to do because they were apparently incapable of acting without being given an order.

They crowd into the tiny office, approach the door with a dust-covered and lopsided blind hung over the window on the other side of the room but, when Elva tries to open it with a bloody hand, she finds that it’s locked.

“Move,” Yasha says, pushes through the crowd, leans her weapon against the wall and then, much like the men outside, like when she’d broken down the barrier between Fjord and the bomb, she starts throwing herself at it. She’s making progress but not fast enough; Jester hands Elva over to Molly, moves up beside Yasha and starts to help. The wood cracks, splinters, the glass shatters, the blind rattling and swaying and the hinges protest, slamming open in the entirely _wrong_ direction they were meant to go in but the door crashes open, hitting the outside wall with a noisy _whack_.

They all stumble back outside into a wide alley separating this warehouse from the one beside it but, instead of finding it empty, there’s a much larger shuttle parked and waiting.

“Here!” Elva says, starts taking them towards it, fishing in her pocket and pulling out a small device that she pushes her thumb against and the engine roars to life, all of the doors sliding open. She detaches from Molly, climbs into the driver’s seat, sticky hands gripping the wheel, breathing heavily, and she watches as they clamber in. “Just throw the car seats in the back,” she says hurriedly. Yasha unbuckles them, chucks them into the wide space that functioned as a trunk and then slides to one end of the bench seat, Beau coming in next, Caleb right beside her. There’s only two seats left in front of them—besides the driver and the passenger, which Jester already claimed (“Shotgun!” she had yelled as she dived in); Nott manages to squeeze herself on Caleb’s other side (the advantages, Fjord figures, of being small) and then Fjord drags himself into the seat behind Jester, sees Molly sit himself directly behind Elva.

The doors close and there’s the _crack_ of a gunshot.

“Your right tail-light is broken,” a pleasant, computerized voice announces. Elva pushes a few buttons on the console between her and Jester, the shuttle beeps cheerfully, and then they start to drive.

“Where am I taking you?” Elva asks, cruising past warehouses, past chain link fences and then out to a narrow road that led into traffic, into the rest of _everyone else_. Fjord watches this all go by, their voices turning into murmurs and hums. The woman is singing to him through the radio, except when he looks, the radio isn’t on. They’re all discussing at once, all offering choices, options, and Beau appears by Fjord’s head as she leans forward, kneeling on the shuttle floor. Fjord feels the same way that he felt when they were on the ship and he knew he was about to go back to that black place again. He _could_ fight it. He probably should. On the _Bathynomus_ when this happened they were in a crisis, they couldn’t do anything to him even if they wanted to but they weren’t there anymore. They were safe—safe enough—and if he succumbed, he could wake up somewhere terrible. He could possibly not wake up at all.

Resting his head back against the headrest, Fjord lets his eyes roam, listens to the muffled arguments. He didn’t trust them, not exactly, not yet. But he didn’t _not_ trust them either. He’s tired anyway. It’s been days since he got any proper rest. He opens his mouth to say something but all that comes out is _click click click_.

Everything goes dark.

 

& & & &

 

Fjord is floating. He’s not starfished this time, legs and arms not spread, but he still can’t move. There is nothing here except for him but then, in the distance, an enormous beaming ball of light, a startling resemblance to an eye, starts drifting closer and closer until it’s right in front of him, looming and massive. Each time he expects to be blinded by it—his eyes watering like staring into the sun—but it doesn’t affect him. They stare at each other for what feels like an eternity.

“Watching,” the voice coming both from everywhere and nowhere at the same time says. “Potential.”

“I told you,” Fjord says and there’s no stuttering, no confusion. “I said I would fix it.” _I would get it fixed._ Beacons of light flicker off from the orb and it sways, left and right. It says nothing. Something small, something round and polished like a marble but so much bigger, comes out of it, hovering between them. There are swirls, oranges and yellows, a slit like an eye in the middle. It looks like the _thing_ staring at him but it isn’t glowing.

“Learn,” it says. “Grow.” He’s unsure of what it wants. He feels as if he was supposed to take it, but he _can’t_.

“I don’t— I don’t understand,” Fjord replies.

“Find,” it says eventually.

“Where is it?”

“Find.” It repeats.

“And then what? What do I do with it?” There’s a pause.

“Consume.”

The marble comes at him fast and, just when he thinks it’s going to collide with his body, it vanishes. The black turns to brilliant white around him, the energy becomes _everything_. He can’t see, he can’t feel. He starts to fall, dropping like a stone. There’s a figure coming at him, trying to catch up, but it doesn’t look like anyone. A person-shaped existence. A hand reaches out and he finds he can move his arm, reach back.

Fingers grasp around his own and, in six different voices, the figure says:

“Got you.”

 

& & & &

 

Fjord wakes up.

The ceiling above him is painted off-white, brown stains from water damage spread in formless splotches, his mind already trying to make a familiar shape out of them like looking for animals in clouds but coming up empty. He’s aware of his head resting against something soft—a real pillow and not the hard surface of the _Bathynomus_ ’ medical table—and he listens for the sounds of a hospital but, instead, all he hears is the sound of his own breathing, of _someone else_ breathing, footsteps and an ambiguous conversation as people walked down a hallway just outside the room. It smells like flowers.

He lies there for a moment, not moving, taking it all in. His head doesn’t hurt. He closes his eyes, tries to feel for the alien that had taken residence, the _movement_ of it like he’d gotten attuned to but there’s nothing there. The computer, nestled in his metal skull, once again belonged solely to him. There’s no beeping. There’s no music, either. No joyful tune. He doubts he’d be able to forget it, would likely find himself humming it when he wasn’t paying attention, but it wasn’t _there_.

Bending his arms, he props himself up on his elbows, drawing himself up into a sitting position. The room is clearly a hotel, a television up on the wall across from him, small table stretched out underneath. The screen is lit up with moving pictures: a Tabaxi wanders through an impressive garden, points at a bush of pink flowers but the volume had been muted and Fjord has no idea what they were saying. The wine red curtains have been pulled shut, the lamp beside the bed he’d been stretched out on glowing orange, giving the room a strange sort of warmth, the light thrumming slightly.

“Well,” he hears Molly say beside him and he turns his head to see him sitting on the second bed, his ankles crossed. He picks up a remote, turns the screen off. “It’s about time.”

“What—” Fjord had too many questions. _What happened? What day is it? Where am I?_ The clicking is gone. He sounds _right_ again.

“We’re at a hotel. Let’s start there. You’ve been out for a day and half.”

“A day and a half?” Fjord echoes. He rubs his face, pulls his fingers through his hair and then hesitates, feels around his head for a scar, for something _missing_ but it felt normal. Taking his hand away, he realizes which one he’d been using and holds it closer to the light, inspecting it. There’s some sort of opaque, pale green skin, mesh pulled over the surface, wrapped around what once was exposed metal. It’s definitely not perfect but it also isn’t Second Skin and a cast, isn’t a couple of scarves, duct tape, and a leather glove either. If he didn’t know what he was, he’d almost be willing to assume it’s a prosthetic. “What happened?” He can get that out. That, really, was the most important.

Molly plants his palms down on the mattress, spins himself so he’s facing Fjord, puts his feet on the beige carpet.

“We had to tell Elva what was going on with you. Didn’t have much of a choice. Turns out, our new friend didn’t start life as a stooge to L&N. Before that, she worked for the Beta Corporation.” Beta Corp. Fjord had seen their commercials, heard their name on the news; they were one of the companies ‘leading the way’ to new and improved artificial intelligence. “I feel like there’s a word for that, but it’s not coming to me.” Molly smiles.

“Why’d she leave?”

“Didn’t say. Didn’t pry. None of my business,” Molly says. “Jester said she knew someone who owed her mother but it certainly sounded more like blackmail to me. We got you into a facility that had the right sort of tools and Elva and Jester fixed you right up. Good as new.” He gesture’s to Fjord’s arm. “There about. Patched up Elva and Beau as well.” A pause to take a breath. “We asked Elva about L&N while you were out. About what the hell their deal was, what was going on. We were right, for the most part.” He explains it, going through it as quickly as he could: L&N _had_ known about the creature for about two years before they sent the _Bathynomus_ down to get it. Exploratory ships and their crews had been going missing but, because they were working a contract with the government to scout locations for an underwater base-of-operations, they knew the _second_ they revealed what was going on, the contract would be severed, the project would end or they’d move to another ocean, another company.

There was only a single vague, blurry picture and the terrified rambling from a sole survivor, all of which made a home on conspiracy sites and message boards, the type of place nobody paid any mind to. L&N thought they were safe. But still, they had to know for sure—they were, after all, scientists. So they sent down the _Johnsonii_ on repeated trips, over and over under the guise of exploration with nothing coming of it until the last one, until after someone tampered with the sonic pulse emitter, and that’s when the creature decided to make an appearance. (Elva had sworn to the others that she hadn’t known about the tampering until one of her co-workers let it accidentally slip over drinks after work and, at the time, had been working on building a case against them, searching for evidence to show the right short of people. _Have we got a hard drive for you_ , Molly had told her.) They hadn’t expected the video. They hadn’t expected real, undeniable _proof_ that something was down there.

“So they cobbled us together,” Molly says. “Told us half-truths and kicked us down into the ocean, hoping we were too gullible too be worried about the consequences of fighting them if we _did_. You should have heard the things Elva said Stodiana said about us.” He opens his palms, holds out his arms. _The end._ He lets Fjord absorb everything he’d said and then changes the subject. “Did you know Jester was loaded?”

“I did not,” Fjord says.

“She paid for all of our rooms. Not exactly the nicest place but we had to talk her out of shacking us all up at the Zion. Truth be told, I would have prefered it but they ask far less questions in places like these.” Molly stands, brushes the wrinkles from his pants but, instead of going somewhere, wandering around, he sits down on the edge of Fjord’s bed. “Feeling better, then?” He asks.

“I don’t know,” Fjord answers honestly.

“Hm.” Molly lifts a hand, presses it against the side of Fjord’s head and Fjord frowns, but not because of the contact.

“What about the, uh… The little guy.”

“Ah. The freeloader,” Molly says, takes his hand away, rests it on the sheet. “It’s sitting in a jar in someone’s bag, last time I saw it.”

“It’s still alive.”

“Of course,” Molly says. Why wouldn't it be? None of the ones they’ve encountered had proven they were willing to do so otherwise. The big one might have, or they had simply fled before it could piece itself back together enough for round two. “We haven’t quite, shall we say, agreed on what to do with it. I think Jester’s already named it.” Fjord looks around the room again, at the sliver of buildings and sky between the curtains.

“L&N,” he says finally. “Stodiana?”

“Nothing. Not yet,” Molly corrects himself. “Any day, I’m sure. But for now we’re under the radar.” Another silence. Fjord’s still staring out the window, feels Molly lifting himself up and, when he turns his head back towards him, he has a hand out. Fjord takes it even though he doesn’t need to, allows Molly to aid him in getting to his feet and he stands over him, smiles lightly. Briefly. He leans forward slightly, inhales, and Molly blinks at him but then Fjord changes his mind, moves past him towards what he figures is the bathroom. “That’s just rude,” Molly calls after him and Fjord chuckles as he flicks on the sickly fluorescent light over the sink. “Don’t take too long. Everyone’s waiting.” Fjord can taste metal in the back of his throat but he ignores it, turns on the water and washes his face, still can’t quite make himself look at his reflection in the mirror.

 

& & & &

 

There’s a diner—outfitted in silver and red chrome, glinting in the grey afternoon sun—that shared the same lot as the hotel and a bell sound crackles from a speaker hooked up to the door, a taste of nostalgia, the wires stretched along the heavily blemished ceiling, stapled to the plaster tiles. The place is surprisingly full, people sitting at booths, at the counter, most having conversations, some alone, and the clatter and sizzle of food being _cooked_ instead of made in a Meal Dispenser fills the air around him.

An eruption of noises come from somewhere to his left and he hears Jester yell: “Again, again!” He and Molly weave through the other tables, find two that had been pushed together in the back, the other five—and Elva—sitting around them, plates almost empty, a carafe left on the uneven center, steaming, their mugs filled to varying levels. Beau is standing a couple feet away, back to the doors for the bathrooms and Jester is on the opposite side of the table, a knife dripping with syrup clutched like a projectile in one fist. “Okay,” she says, “Here we go!”

Beau squares herself, spreads her legs apart slightly, hands open at her sides, waiting, and Jester throws the knife in her direction, the utensil turning end-over-end and—just as it seemed like it was going to brain some poor idiot who chose that exact moment to walk out of the men’s room—Beau’s hand darts with impressive speed, stops right in front of the Elf’s face, her fingers grasping around the knife, catching it in mid-air. The Elf looks shocked, unnerved, and there’s a tense silence before Beau turns back to Jester and they both lift their arms up, cheering. Nott stands on her chair, clapping, Yasha nods approvingly, and Caleb looks as if he wished he could pretend that he didn’t know who these people were.

“Hey! Yo!” Beau calls out, points in their direction when she sees Molly and Fjord standing there.

“Fjord!” Jester exclaims, gives him a hug, squeezing a little too tightly. After she lets go, she pulls out an unoccupied chair between her and Elva, inviting him to sit down and Molly takes his seat across from him, beside Caleb. Beau sits, too, drops the knife she was holding on her plate onto a pile of half-eaten potatoes but then she sits up a little, starts waving her hand.

“Hey! Waiter guy! What’s-your-name!” Keeps at it until their very harried waiter has rounded the end of the counter and come up to their table. “Yeah, uh…” She glances to Fjord. “What do you want?” He hesitates, had only just showed up, didn’t even know what they had but Beau waves a hand at him. “Just get him what you gave me.” The waiter sighs, nods and walks off, reaching for a tablet in the front of his apron and scrolling through it before approaching the window looking into the kitchen and yelling through it. “Here.” Beau gets up, snatches a turned-over, clean mug from an empty table and tosses it at Fjord, who reaches for the carafe and pours the last dredges of coffee into it.

After all acknowledging how it was good to see him, how glad they were that he was alright, they fall back into disorderly chatter and Fjord adjusts himself in his seat to get a better angle on Elva, who had mostly been sitting quietly, smiling every now and then when one of them said something funny.

“I hear I have you to thank for setting me right,” he says. She looks embarrassed, shrugs and takes a drink from her own mug but then says:

“You’re welcome. It’s been… It’s been awhile since I’ve worked on someone like you.” Elva keeps her voice low but she likely didn’t need to; the others were loud enough to drown her out. “I have to ask: Do you know what company made you? It couldn’t have been Beta. I haven’t worked there in years but old friends keep me in the loop and they’re still nowhere _near_ this level of… complexity.” Fjord clears his throat and waits for his food to be put in front of him (two waffles, potatoes, and a healthy serving of crisp bacon), waits until the waiter walks away, before answering.

“I have no idea.” He stabs a golden yellow potato with his fork. It practically melts in his mouth.

“Well,” she says. “It’s impressive. _You_ are impressive.”

“So I’ve been told,” Fjord replies, glances at Molly who was currently in the middle of a discussion with Caleb, hands gesturing while he spoke. He looks back to Elva. “I must say, I’m surprised you’re still here.”

“I wanted to wait until you woke up. Just in case I need to tweak something. But you seem fine.” Fjord suddenly gets a flash, an image of _car seats._ “Your kids…” He starts to say. Was Stodiana the type to go after them to get to Elva? Was Elva even in trouble?

“It’s alright. They’ve been with my wife, visiting her mother this week. They’re fine. Safe.” She shrugs again. “I’m trying not to panic about it too much right now. You guys…” She peers around the table at each of them. “Like I said, I’ll do what I can but I think, best case, I may be out of a job right now. You’d be better off laying low for awhile.” Fjord rests his hand on his thigh, feels something small and solid in his pocket, slides his hand in and pulls out the symbol of Bahamut. He holds it out to Elva.

“I believe this is yours.”

“Keep it,” Elva says. “Maybe it’ll still bring you luck.” Fjord’s not sure it ever did in the first place, but he nods, tucks it back where he’d pulled it from. They lapse into a quiet that’s only a slightly awkward.

“Oh _fuck off_ ,” Beau says suddenly to Molly, who grins back at her. Yasha says something but it’s washed under the ambient sounds from the rest of the diner.

“Hey, Fjord!” Jester says, tapping his arm, getting his attention. “Did Molly tell you about Fjord, Jr.?”

“Fjord, Jr.?” Fjord asks, feels a pained expression pull across his face and Jester nods, leans down to pick her bright pink bag off of the floor, settle it in her lap and unhook the strap keeping it closed. She takes out a jar that had no reasonable way of being able to fit in there and plunks it down onto the table, rattling the dishes and silverware. Inside was a single piece of _mass_ , slick from acid and just barely moving, a piece of black wire stuck inside it, poking out of one end and Fjord figures it must have come from _him_. His stomach churns but he’s more concerned about a stranger just happening to see it if they looked in their direction and he scoots closer, tries to shield it from the people behind him. “ _Jester_. Come on.”

“Eh. Nobody cares.” She was probably right. But still. He looks away from it, occupies himself with poking at his food even though he was no longer hungry. Hopefully that would pass. “I was going to name it Kiri but that name is too cute for something so ugly,” Jester says, speaking the last bit to the alien. “Caleb says there’s no way it should be able to survive out here.” But it was. Somehow, it was. “He wants to study it. Nott and Yasha think we should step on it like a bug.” Fjord doesn’t say anything but, internally, he finds himself agreeing with the latter two. Jester finally puts the jar away. “So. What now?” She asks at the same time that there’s a lull in the conversations of the others and they overhear her, one-by-one turning their attention to the beginning of this one.

“I don’t know,” Fjord says. They had to stay away from Lebedev-Narita. And they had to stay together. Other than that, their options were relatively open.

“Don’t you want to figure out what happened to you? How you ended up like, you know, this?” Beau asks.

“Yeah,” Nott says. “You should find the people that did this to you.”

“I say leave the past in the past,” Molly counters. “Move forward.” A vision of a marble, a voice saying _consume_. “I’ve found that’s done me a lot of good.”

“Besides, the only way we’re going to do that is if we get ourselves a space-worthy ship and it’s not exactly like I have one sitting in my garage,” Fjord says.

“I have money,” Jester says. “Or, well, my _mother_ has money. But she could send me some.”

“We could pitch in. I mean, how much could it cost? Couple hundred?” Beau asks.

“Thousand,” Fjord corrects. “Couple _thousand_.” And that was to rent a used one that likely wouldn’t take them anywhere _near_ as far as they needed to go. For _that_ they’d need to fork over five digits worth of credits and Fjord doubts that, no matter how ‘loaded’ Jester was, she couldn’t get them that much.

“Shit,” Beau says. “We could scrounge that together, though, right? There’s always people doing under-the-radar stuff they need other people to handle.” Out of the corner of his eye, Fjord sees Nott and Caleb having a quiet conference at the other end of the table and it ends rather abruptly, Caleb nodding.

“I was looking at a map of the area,” Jester says, “And there’s this little town called Hubbard that I want to visit.”

“Why? What’s there?” Fjord asks.

“I have no idea! I just like the way it sounds. Hubbard, Hubbard, Hubbard,” she says, repeating it. A brief stillness settles over them, the sounds of the rest of the world filling the gaps for a moment.

“So that’s the plan then,” Fjord says, “The seven of us, heading out to… find my creators.”

“Sounds exciting,” Jester clasps her hands together and bumps her shoulder up against Fjord’s. After paying the check, parting ways with Elva, they start making their way back to the hotel. “We need a name,” Jester says as they walk together across the parking lot.

“We do?” Yasha asks.

“Oh, yeah. Definitely. We’re a group now. You heard the waiter. ‘Does the group want anything else’? So we need a name. All good groups need a name.” There’s a chorus of ‘uh’s and ‘hmm’s.

“How about ‘The Mighty Nein’,” Caleb suggests.

“Nine?” Beau questions. “But there’re only seven of us.”

“No. Nein as in—” Caleb tries to explain but Jester talks over him.

“There’s technically nine. All of us and Frumpkin and Fjord, Jr.”

“Fjord, Jr. is _not_ a member of this group,” Nott says.

“Why not?”

“I didn’t vote on it,” Molly chimes in.

“We didn’t vote on _Frumpkin_ being in the group,” Jester complains.

“That’s because we _like_ Frumpkin,” Molly says. They continue talking, quarrelling as they walk into their tumble-down hotel but Fjord stops short once they hit the lobby.

“What is it, Fjord?” Jester asks and the rest of them stall, too.

“We don’t have a car,” Fjord says. Elva had driven them out of the warehouse and probably been the one to chauffer them here but now she was gone, going home to her wife and kids and to try and fix things.

“Shit. You’re right,” Beau says and then leaps up onto a low coffee table surrounded by lumpy, overstuffed chairs meant to be a waiting area. “Hey,” she yells out to the people behind the counter, the tourists meandering through, coming in from lunch or just going out, people who had driven all night only now deciding to stop and find a room. “Anyone know where we can find a car around here?” Everyone stares. Nobody answers. “Or not. Whatever.” She jumps down.

But then, from behind the counter, a young woman leans forward, waves them over.

“My cousin owns a garage just down the block. He sells old cars.” Fjord frowns. They weren’t exactly carrying bags of money on them. They barely even had enough clothes to last the week, only had what they brought with them on the _Bathynomus._ She must see the look on his face, lifts a hand. “You guys look pretty capable. He has this problem he hasn’t been able to find someone to deal with. I’ll call him, let him know you’re coming? Maybe if you help him out you guys can make a deal or something.”

“What kind of problem?” Fjord inquires as she picks up her phone, rests the receiver on her shoulder as she dials. “Dunno. We don’t talk too much. But knowing him, it’s pretty dangerous.” Her cousin picks up on the first ring and she walks a little ways from them, turns her back to have a conversation.

“Dangerous, huh?” Beau asks.

“We can probably handle that,” Fjord says.

“Sure we can,” Jester says. “We’re the Mighty Nein.”

“Hey, uh, what’d you just say you were called?” The woman has turned back towards them, has the bottom of the phone pulled away from her mouth and Jester says the name again and the woman repeats it into the receiver, hangs up shortly after. Picking up someone’s crumpled, discarded business card, she flips it over to the blank side and scribbles down the address of her cousin’s garage, slides it towards them. Fjord takes it, examines it before curling his hand around it. “There you go, Mighty Nein. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Fjord says.

“Mighty Nein, ho!” Jester says, lifts a fist into the air. “Let’s go do something dangerous!” She starts for the door but stops when she realizes none of them are following her.

“We need our stuff,” Yasha reminds her.

“Let’s get our stuff and then go do something dangerous!” Jester says, lifts her fist again and then spins on her heels and starts marching in the other direction towards the elevators.

“Quite a crew you’ve got yourself here, Captain,” Molly says, coming up beside Fjord.

“I think it’ll work.” _Calculated risks are good for the soul_ , someone had said to him once upon a time. _Sometimes you gotta get a little stupid._ He’d said something else, too, something that Fjord had forgotten, until now: _Just try not to get stupid alone. It’s always better with company._

“Optimism,” Molly says. “I like it.” And then they start moving briskly, rushing to catch up with the others.


	4. NOTES AND REFERENCES.

NOTES:

 

I can’t believe I finished this. I talked myself into giving up and then talked myself out if it. I said I wouldn’t finish and then I told myself that I _would_ but I wouldn’t post it. And yet here we are.

What was it that Fjord says? Yeehaw.

 

The progression of the group moving from strangers to friends went a bit faster here than it’s going on the show proper. I did that because it was easier and the length of this fic would have been even more ridiculous than it already is if I kept it one-hundred precent accurate. The fact is, the players have way more time than I do to get the characters to the point that I wrote them in this story and I didn’t want to be working on this until the end of the year. Most of the decisions I made were purely to keep the story going at a decent pace and to make it both more enjoyable for you to read and for me to write.

I took the whole “Fjord is actually a robot” from the (probably now defunct) theory that’s bandied around the fandom that Fjord isn’t a Half-Orc like he says he is. I simply flipped it from “he knows what he is and is intentionally hiding it” to “he has no idea what he is and _doesn’t_ _know_ he’s hiding it” (which, truthfully could also be possible). I also figured that—since Fjord’s whole Thing is water and they were spending 98% of this story in the ocean—it would be more interesting to keep the same foundation of what we (think we) know about him but flip that as well and have it happen in space instead.

Fjord hasn’t named the ship that he was on that got wrecked so I made one up. I’m sure it’ll be wrong later but, for now, it’s the  _Catterick_. And, like I said before, I started writing this after Episode 17 and made the conscious decision not to use too much of what we learned about the characters past that in this fic. The only thing I _did_ use that was explicitly from a recent episode was the marble-thing that Fjord shoves into himself just because I liked that a lot and I knew I could figure out a way to, at the very least, mention it.

Jester’s ‘Pass Without a Trace” (which is never mentioned by name) is neither a once-per-day thing _or_ a blessing but I didn’t remember either of those things until much later. I decided that it wasn’t worth fixing because I’d have to alter dialogue that I really liked so… you know. It stayed. Please don't be mad.

I had a really great time figuring out how to make these characters and their world fit into this one, re-imagining their spells and abilities and swords as futuristic technology. That being said, there was _a lot_ that I left out, either because they weren’t necessary to the story or because I couldn’t find a way to remold them (or a little of both). I specifically enjoyed coming up with an interesting way to incorporate the Traveler into the fic and I wish there had been a way I could have expanded on his story more.

The positions that the Mighty Nein were given on the _Bath_ were… the best I could come up with. They all needed to do _something_. Yasha, Jester, and Caleb were the easiest. The other four were tough but I had certain roles that had to be filled so I put them where they made the most sense.

Fjord and Jester’s AU backstories are the only ones that are brought up simply because the pasts of the others weren’t something the characters ever had a reason to talk about. That being said, I _do_ have them all figured out because _duh_. If I ever write a sequel, I’m sure I’ll include them in it.

I always like to share the music I listened to while I wrote. This time it was two specific artists—Bersarin Quartett and 36—and four albums: _Existence_ by Immediate, _Volturnus_ by Audiomachine, and  Jóhann Jóhannsson ’s scores for both _Arrival_ and _Sicario_.

 

* * *

 

REFERENCES:

 

Anomaly: 1. a deviation from the norm. 2. in geophysics, the difference between the theoretical or computed and actual value. From [here](https://archive.org/stream/glossaryofoceano00unit/glossaryofoceano00unit_djvu.txt).

Breakwater: a barrier built out into a body of water to protect a coast or harbor from the forces of waves.

I didn’t base Fjord’s robot design off of any one android-type in particular—at least not consciously. Any similarities between the bits and pieces of him that I described and already existing androids are purely coincidental.

The deep-sea suits they wear were inspired by a combination of the [Heavy-Duty Vintage Suit](http://deadspace.wikia.com/wiki/Heavy-Duty_Vintage_Suit) from _Dead Space,_ the [suits](http://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/2015/12/TheExpanse_gallery_101Recap_17.jpg) from _The Expanse_ and, of course, old school [diving suits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEH3Ea9jt8s%20).

The _Johnsonii_ ship name comes from [Melanocetus johnsonii](http://www.fishbase.org/summary/Melanocetus-johnsonii.html) , (the humpback anglerfish). The  _Bathynomus_ comes from [Bathynomus giganteus](http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=259252) (the giant isopod). The _Grimpo_ is named after the genus [Grimpoteuthis](http://tolweb.org/Grimpoteuthis) (the dumbo octopus) . The only one of those three that doesn’t look like the creature it’s named after is the _Grimpo_. It’s basically an [ROV](https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/facts/rov.html) (“remotely operated vehicle”), just without the cables because it’s the future.

Because I love designing spaceships but have zero imagination when it comes to designing guns, I used references for what Fjord, Yasha, and Molly’s weapons look like: [Falchion](https://deathmetaldan.deviantart.com/art/NE-426-Scarab-299293274). [Magician’s Judge](https://psycho4140.deviantart.com/art/Plasma-Rifle-595443521). the [Scimitars](https://malmida.deviantart.com/art/Moth-56878829).

The little snippet from Caleb’s book that Jester reads from in the beginning—as well as where I took some of my own basic information regarding the types of creatures living in the Abyss—is from [Biological Oceanography: An Introduction](http://www.sisal.unam.mx/labeco/LAB_ECOLOGIA/OF_files/54210854-Biological-Oceanography-an-Introduction.pdf), specifically Chapter 8, Section 8.8: “Deep-Sea Ecology”.

[Abyssal Zone](https://www.britannica.com/science/abyssal-zone) (although, to be fair, I fudged _a lot_ of what it actually looks like down there). [Deep-sea trenches](https://www.britannica.com/science/deep-sea-trench). The  Nepomucene Deep isn’t real. I made it up. It was named after [John of Nepomuk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Nepomuk).

[What would happen](https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=2266) to an unprotected person at the bottom of the ocean.

[Jean Piaget's Theory](https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html) [of Cognitive Development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development).

[“Brand New Key” by Melanie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKcpodt0YCU). I love the [trope](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SoundtrackDissonance) of turning happy songs creepy and I’m so glad I got to play with that in this fic.

I never get into specifics within the fic itself but there _are_ [materials out there](http://www.ipolymer.com/blog/6-acid-resistant-materials-that-can-be-used-effectively-in-a-lab/) that are resistant to acids that the ship could be made out of or coated with such as [Hastelloy](https://www.hpalloy.com/Alloys/descriptions/HASTELLOYC_276.aspx), [PTFE](https://www.britannica.com/science/polytetrafluoroethylene) (better known as Teflon), and a [Tungsten carbide coating](https://www.asminternational.org/documents/10192/1884197/amp16307p039.pdf/47669421-9aa6-4f12-a662-f48b1beffc42).

I borrowed the idea of deep-sea creatures reacting aggressively to light from [Peter Watts’ novel, _Starfish_](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66479.Starfish). I think. This is the only major story point that I can’t properly source. I’m sure I could find something _somewhere_ to support how that could make sense if I really tried. Either way, call it a fanciful addition to make the story more interesting.

All the days, hours, etc. that it takes them to get places and do certain things are fake. I’m also a really bad judge of distance. I tried to do the math on all of it but then gave up and decided to just go with what worked best from a storytelling standpoint instead (or what sounded right) .

Honestly, in general, while I did do a bit of research here and there (clearly), I’m not trying to write serious, hard science fiction here. I’ll leave that to the pros who have more energy and better resources. I’m just having fun.

 

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!


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